Many of my friends warned me not to fry the PS3 with in 2 or 3 weeks of buying it. Since Sony has been widely supporting Linux installations on PS3, i didnt think it was much of a risk to do the same. Several websites comment about Sony starting to officially shipping Linux OS on PS3 so that you can use it as a PC. After several weeks of reading through variouis blogs and websites, i was comfortable enough to perform this task of loading linux on the PS3. Now the big question was which version. There were websites talking about Fedora and Yellowdog which are the most popular. I decided to go with Yellowdog from Terrasoft (http://www.terrasoft.com/). Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) is at version 5.0 now. It is the only flavour of Linux that is officially supported on the Sony Playstation 3 (Atleast thats what they claim).
I dont mean to make this post repetitive by describing all the nitty gritty details of how to install Yellow Dog Linux. You can find a very good article about this here.
The big step before installing Linux on the PS3 is that you are going to have to create a separate partition in the PS3 harddrive for Linux to run. Essentially, this is going to be a dual boot between Sony's game OS and the Linux installation. Since its been two weeks, I bought the PS3, i had already downloaded many game demos, videos and also save files from my favourite game Resistance : Fall of man that i couldnt afford to give away while formatting the harddrive to make Linux run on the PS3. I used a 1 gig USB flash drive to save the important files off the PS3 temporarily. Once that was done, from System Settings you can format the harddrive. Now Sony GameOS let you allocate only 10G towards any other OS installations (Big downside). But 10G is enough for the YDL installation.
Next step is to install a boot loader so that you can boot another OS. You have to download two files for this.
a. otheros.self
b. otheros.bld.
Both these are not that hard to find, if you do a quick google search, you should be able to easily find them. The otheros.bld is something that you download specific to the Linux distribution you are installing. The otheros.self is the PS3 OtherOS installer that you can download from Sony's official website for Playstation. Both these files need to be placed in the USB flash drive (Check the FAQ i posted above for detailed instructions). You can install the boot loader again from the PS3 System Settings.
Remember the last step before you start the install to download YDL 5.0 distribution disc (on ISO). Again links to download this is not hard to find (Google is your best friend). Download it burn it in a DVD. I used a slower rate to burn just to be on the safer side.
After i slipped in the disc for YDL 5.0 into the PS3 discdrive, I rebooted the PS3 and in a few seconds (30-45) the infamous penguin started showing up on the left hand screen (pictures above). The installation takes about 1 hour to complete though there were certain parts of the installation wizard that scared me to death. The installation wizard said "YDL cannot read the partition on the disk, so it needs to format the PS3 harddrive". My heart sank for a minute and then the first thing i do is freeze the installation, go to my laptop, search for any information on the FAQ about this. And then i was relieved, reading the information that YDL installation has no idea about the GameOS partition (the remaining 50Gb left in my 60Gb PS3). So its ok to format the 10gig partition as you wish. Still i think Terrasoft should have worded this properly to prevent future heart failures to PS fans.
Once the installation was over, there is a one time setup wizard that will run through setting Time, Date, Root password etc. The default resolution on the Yellowdog system uses 720p, So if you need 1080i or 1080p you have edit some config files to get there. "ps3videomode" is a command you can use to change the display mode (one time only) to various modes that are supported. All in all the YDL distribution looks very kool with its Gnome interface. It comes with all basic tools required to run a PC - IM software, media player, graphics programs, Firefox etc.
After doing all this you will be asking yourself....WTF ? what did i gain after installing Linux on my PS3 ? Some bragging rights....
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