The day of the Japanese PS3 launch came and went. And with it, it brought along a ton of news. But you still haven't seen the best bit yet! You see, before Sony even released more info about Yellow Dog Linux for the PS3, Power Developer has already released kernel patches and a bootloader so that you can try out Linux on your PS3.
Yes, this is huge news in itself. But that's not all. Apparently, you can install ANY linux distro on your PS3 as long as it has a PowerPC build available- And that includes just about every popular distribution of Linux out there. A quick hop to my favorite distro websites shows that all of them run on PowerPC processors, which means that all of them will probably run on the PS3.
Here's a small list of the Linux distros which run on PowerPC (PPC)
Ubuntu
Fedora Core
SUSE (Paid) / openSUSE (Free)
Gentoo
I'm sorry if I haven't listed your favorite distro here. You can make your way to DistroWatch.com and check out your distro's site to see if they have a build for the PPC. There's a very good chance that it will be supported. Also, some sites might list the PPC builds as "Apple Macintosh" versions. They are built for PowerPC and they should run on the PS3, though don't come after my head if they don't. Now here's some of the info from the PS3 kernel patch documents.
The patch is for kernel 2.6.19. You can download the plain vanilla kernel here and patch it yourself. But that's beside the point, because the documents which are released here, have a small how-to on installing Fedora Core 5 on your PS3. And the only things you need are:
* Other OS installer (otheros.self)
o You can get the binary from http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/
* kboot image compressed by gzip (otheros.bld)
o You can find this in Addon Packages CD.
* Fedora Core 5 PPC install DVD
o You can get Fedora Core 5 PPC install DVD from Fedora Project (http://fedora.redhat.com/)
* Addon Packages CD.
The only thing which we currently don't have is the Other OS installer. A quick check on the mentioned site reveals that Sony hasn't yet put it up there. A few more days, I think. The Addon Packages CD would probably be supplied with the PS3 itself, or so I think.
And finally, for everyone here who's hungry to tinker with the material before the PS3 is released in the US, here's the kernel patches, the bootloader, and a bunch of documents to make it easier for you. I'm soo envious of our Japanese friends right now who'll probably be busy tinkering with their PS3.
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