InfiniteTides

My installation of OpenSUSE on my Playstation 3 has been a success. There are some minor issues that bug me, like not being able to get the display to fill the standard definition TV screen. This causes some problems. I can’t see the bottom of some menus, which means that approving changes can be difficult to impossible.

I’ve been watching a couple of episodes of a TV show (streamed from my Dell) in full screen on Kaffein, and it looks fantastic (despite the resolution and screen size). I also added my favorite podcasts to Amarok so I can hear them through my receiver. Firefox doesn’t exactly show websites correctly, because of the resolution, but I don’t plan on surfing on the PS3 very much. Just enough to find and add sources for such things as podcasts. The KDE screen savers look nice at least. One glaring issue I’ve noticed is how little RAM the Playstation 3 seems to have when running Linux. It’s not really an issue for what I’m doing with it, so it’s no big deal to me.

There’s just a couple more glitches that threatened to throw a wrench into my Linux on PS3 experience, but I found fixes or work-arounds for them. The first is that my username was not placed in the audio group by default, so I had no sound until I added it. The second, and rather an annoying bug, is that pressing the del key on the keyboard at the boot menu doe NOT boot the PS3’s OS as it should. Instead, I have to press the esc key, then type ps3-boot-game-os on the command line. Seriously, this needs to be fixed!

It’s nice to have another option for streaming media out in the living room.

It’s Saturday morning, and I just finished burning the openSUSE 10.3 for PPC DVD. Yesterday I backed up my game saves to my USB flash memory drive and reformatted my Playstation 3’s hard drive, devoting just 10 of the 60 GB to the Linux partition. After getting my second cup of coffee I’ll be ready to install Linux on my PS3(again).

I’ve installed the boot loader, changed the default system to boot to from PS3 to Other OS, and the Playstation 3 is rebooting. Fingers crossed!

9:55 AM: My USB mouse and keyboard work, and I’ve started the very familiar openSUSE installation. The screen on my SD tv is a littler flickery, but I can deal with that.

10:02 AM: Confirmt partition scheme and packages to install (KDE desktop). Commencing installation.

10:05 AM: Phone rings. I answer…4 seconds of silence, so I hang up.

10:12 AM: Toes are cold so I put on socks.

10:24 AM: Downloaded and installed a plugin on this blog to “sticky” a post (e.g. latest blogcast)….and it broke my site so I uninstalled it.

10:34 AM: Downloaded and installed a 2nd sticky post plugin. Stickied my latest blogcast.

10:54 AM: Configured network settings, and skipping network test.

10:57 AM: Setup a username.

11:00 AM: Fixed 3rd cup of coffee and completed Linux installation by accepting the default hardware configuration.

11:05 AM: Successfully booted openSUSE on the PS Triple.

11:10 AM: Corrected network and firewall settings (I never get those right the first time!) and added community update repositories.

11:36 AM: Began checking for updates.

11:39 AM: Began downloading/installing updates.

12:15 PM: Listening to GFW Radio podcast and starting to wonder if the updates will ever complete (so many updates!).

4:12 PM: Got back from my brothers. Downloaded and installed Win32 codecs from here.

6:20 PM: Added my favorite podcasts to Amorok, and started listening to Buzz Out Loud.

I’ll continue to update this post as I go.