Tuesday, March 20, 2007
As promised three weeks back, and in the latest of a series of hands-on reports on Sony's PlayStation 3, I wanted to give you a brief update after my Linux-cognizant friend Denis fired up the console yesterday. As a reminder before proceeding, the intent of my Linux-focused coverage of the PS3 is to evaluate its appropriateness as a cost-effective software development platform for Cell processor-intended code.
Denis immediately noticed (as I had earlier) that the display was difficult to read when I connected the PS3 to the Princeton Graphics AF3.0HD CRT over component video cabling, even at 720p and 1080i HD settings and even when we sat abnormally close to the screen. I previously noted that YDL (Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux) also provides access to RGB as an output option, and to a diverse set of resolutions at that output setting. However, due to lack of time, we didn't explore this path as a possible means of cleaning up the GUI presentation. By the way, we used a Logitech MX Duo wireless keyboard-and-mouse set, which worked fine albeit at limited range (which, from past experience, wasn't a surprise).
YDL uses Yum as a user-friendly wrapper for RPM (one of a number of Linux package managers). We were a little surprised to find no updates available when we ran Yum yesterday; YDL for the PS3 has been out since late last November, and the absence of updates nearly four months later suggests that Terra Soft and its partners need to do a better job of cranking out Cell-compiled software builds.
To wit, YDL 5 bundles v1.5.0.1 of Firefox, a now-insecure and buggy build that was upgraded to v1.5.0.2 on March 13, 2006 (over eight months prior to YDL 5's release!) and has been also superceded by Firefox v2.x. The 'check for updates' feature is grayed-out and inaccessible in YDL's Firefox build; while I suppose I could compile and merge Firefox updates each time they're released, that's not a particularly user-friendly approach.
To test out GCC, we downloaded and compiled Mplayer 1.0 rc1, along with its accompanying codec suite, as a hardware and software wringing-out equivalent to my Flight Simulator on DOS-and-Windows tests of days past. 'Configure' took 27 seconds, and 'make' an additional 13.5 minutes; both completed without errors. We weren't able to subsequently play back a DVD, I suspect because YDL doesn't include the necessary (but DMCA-infringing) libdvdcss library. We were able to download and playback a Bt music video from Divx's website, albeit not in fullscreen mode. I'm not sure if this is because we didn't have the correct display output flag set, or because (as I noted before) YDL doesn't currently have comprehensive access to the graphics hardware.
I'll close with a few other project suggestions that you fellow Linux-on-PS3 enthusiasts may want to pursue. Please report back your results!
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