Playstation 3 hard disk to run Linux

Mike 12 Jun, 2005 at 6:55pm ET Article published in Tech

SONY COMPUTER Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi has suggested the upcoming Playstation 3 will come equipped with a hard disk. And the hard disk may come with Linux pre-installed.

“We’re positioning the PS3 as a supercomputer”, he says, “But people won’t recognize it as a computer unless we call it a computer, so we’re going to run an OS on it. In fact, the Cell can run multiple OSes. In order to run the OSes, we need a hard disk. So in order to declare that the PS3 is a computer, I think we’ll have [the hard disk] preinstalled with Linux as a bonus.

Source: The Inquirer

Comments

13 Jun 2005 ~ 12:33am drasnor One word:

AWESOME!!!

-drasnor
13 Jun 2005 ~ 12:38am Rewired

drasnor wrote:

One word:

AWESOME!!!

-drasnor

Yeah man; totally. The last line of this article cracked me up.

"The Xbox 360 is expected to ship with a 20GB hard drive as standard. It is not expected to be running Linux."
13 Jun 2005 ~ 12:53am drasnor Just imagine the Linux market penetration after this. Everyone with a PS3 counts as a Linux user. Maybe this'll be incentive for developers to get Linux ready to be a real desktop OS.

Before I get flamed for that last statement, here's why I disagree that Linux is ready to be a major player vs Windows:
Migration from OSS to ALSA isn't complete. Latest final build of ALSA has problems with many soundcards (crashing). User must compile beta ALSA implementations for working sound.
Configuring X (the GUI) requires a text-editor. No equivalent for the Windows "Display" control panel exists.
Actually, most any configuration on Linux requires Googling and a text editor. This is a major shortcoming.

To put it bluntly, Linux is like the rainforests, it's very beautiful and necessary to our survival but if you change anything it dies.

-drasnor
13 Jun 2005 ~ 8:40pm Jengo thats sweet! just imagine! everyone can have a super linux PC!! and now there excuse for not migrating cant be "it cant play games" cause you wont need it to! the PS3 will do it for you!
14 Jun 2005 ~ 7:04am Nosferatu I've been a long time linux user but recently i'm starting to realize linux won't get anywhere in the mainstream desktop market if they don't dumb things down A LOT. OS X does a fine job of just that, it's a shame they [Apple] don't have more of the market.
14 Jun 2005 ~ 8:43pm RWB I think this is awsome, in fact.... I think I'll start working on getting linux installed on my main system to learn it a bit.
15 Jun 2005 ~ 10:31am Garg Oh hell yeah. This might mean I get rid of my livingroom computer, and play all my media files off the Playstation
15 Jun 2005 ~ 10:36am TheBaron I'm almost positive that you're making assumptions as to what Linux means in this case, when you shouldn't be.

it'll be like a Linux-based front-end or something
15 Jun 2005 ~ 10:54am Garg In the article, the guy mentions consumer OSes like Lindows, Windows, and OSX. I think that means they're at least considering the idea of being able to use the console as a computer. We'll see what actually gets realeased, though.