PS3 desktop

Greetings to the OpenSUSE community! This is my first post on these forums so I would like to introduce myself a little before I start.

I began using linux regularly with OpenSUSE 10.2, but never had time to really look deep into the matter. so I’m still considering myself a newbie who is unaware of many things. Mostly I was very happy with the suse distros, therefore I would prefer to use 11.1 for the project I am about to describe.

I am planning to set up a desktop machine using the Playstation 3 game console. I know that there are some problems with the PS3’s hardware which seem to not allow to run a fast system, like the lack of RAM for example. However, this is not such a big problem to me because this machine is to replace an old PC of mine I bought back in 1999 (Pentium 3 600 Mhz, 64 MB RAM etc.) which my parents are using at home. I would like to set up a more stable and secure system for them so I do not need to worry about what they are doing with the PC ( especcially online). They mainly use it for web, e-mail and a little office work. I believe it should be possible to get the ps3 to do these things smoothly.

I will document everything that is needed to be done for this in detail, and make a public tutorial out of it so more people can make use of this. Therefore any bit of information in regards of this project would be much appreciated. I am specifically interested in ways of stabelizing and speeding up the system as good as possible (even though speed is not the focus of this, it surely wouldn’t hurt either).

An idea of mine is to create a specified version of openSUSE for the PS3 using Suse Studio. Do you have any advice on how to do this (I have already experimented with suse studio but not in regards of a ps3 distro) or do you think this isn’t such a good idea? I know I could just use yellow dog linux, but as stated above I would prefer running a suse system. By making this specified ps3 version public, we could also get more people into the boat, at least if it works well.

I plan on setting up the system during the easter holidays, so early responsed would help me out a lot. For the future (perhabs during the summer) I plan to turn the old computer into a firewall using IPCop and do some networking with my laptop and maybe a network-harddisk as a fileserver, I don’t know wether we shall discuss this in a seperate thread or not.

I have seen some other threads on ps3 issues, but I hope you don’t mind that I started a new one for my specific situation. It is just much easier for me to keep track on the available, practical information if it’s in this thread. Furthermore it makes things easier for the planned tutorial.

In closing I want to thank you for reading (I hope I didn’t write to much and you could understand everything as english is not my native language) and tell you again that every advice will be much appreciated. Just let me know if you need any more info on anything. Thanks in advance!