WillWybrow.com

Well, finally, after an incredible amount of cumulative hours trying, failing and trying again, I have successfully got Yellow Dog Linux installed on a PS3 with fully-functioning wireless networking support.

And I promised myself that my first act with this new tool would be to post on this site about it!

Future developments include sexy streaming videos from anywhere in the world (well, the flat at least)… and from there? There is no limit.

Having failed to boot the promised wonder of the custom PS3 2.6.24 kernel, I decided to give the whole thing another try by downloading the source for the latest, 2.6.25, and compiling that on the PS3. What could go wrong?

Well, I didn’t fine-tune the modules and drivers that I needed, so it took for fucking ever. Then, of course, when it was done, the PS3 wouldn’t boot into it. Pushing my browser to its limit, I opened up a quick page to search for possible causes of the problems. There are two tentative answers to the problem; one that I need the latest kboot version, and to install that (but I think I already have it… I can, however, check). The other “solution” is that the PS3 doesn’t like booting into kernels above 2.6.22… I can’t see this being a likely answer, however.

I did discover an undercurrent of Microsoft-style totalitarianism after I executed make install. The kernel installer takes it upon itself to change my boot configuration and update the vmlinux symlink in /boot to whatever new fucking thing it was, and rename whatever it pointed to before to vmlinux.old.

This is all well and good, apart from the fact that my stable kernel was already called vmlinux.old, and this got overwritten. That meant it was a frantic dash for the kboot prompt before it timed out and booted an unbootable kernel to firstly search the hard drive for a usable kernel (oh, I’d forgotten which ones worked and which ones didn’t) and get the command line options right. I eventually was given a half-way there shell prompt which (unlike the kboot shell) mounted the hard drive as writable. So, I was able to scribe myself a new kboot.conf using echo that gave me options for a number of the older kernels. Next reboot, we were back rolling.

Anyway, to summarise the problems: the system freezes about 5 lines after the kboot prompt.

The fun never ends with everyone’s favourite open source operating system…

As stated in the previous post, I tried installing a custom 2.6.24 PPC kernel this morning. To my complete irritation, the thing installed after a great deal of hassle on my part, but still failed to boot when I needed it to.

On the plus side, I now know that the best working kernel I’m playing with at the moment supports the PS3’s wired connection completely. Before, this was just an assumption, and knowing my luck, it could easily have not worked at all, or only worked on the kernel that omits the SD card slot driver… But it works fine, and I gave ToolChronicles a customary browse with good old Firefox… It wasn’t satisfying enough to wash out the ashen taste of failure in my mouth from not getting 2.6.24 to boot, however.

Not to worry, I shall be going over the instructions (if I can find the page again throughout my many tabs) and checking I did everything right. And I’ll probably have another shot at it either tomorrow, Wednesday or Thursday at the very latest. I will keep you all posted (if you care…).

…is triple your usual web browsing

Loading the PocketPC build of Fedora 5 Core onto Roku’s 60GB PS3 was much easier than I’d expected. Making it run perfectly was not.

Aside from there being no wireless network support (which is really more of an inconvenience than a real issue anyway), there was some stupid problem with Fedora that kicked off all users (bar root) after ten seconds of being logged in to KDE or Gnome. Scouring the internet (and tripling my browsing) came up with no solutions. So, abandoning that, I tried to download Yellow Dog Linux, which allegedly included wireless support anyway, further helping the situation. But, when the time came to click on the link to the FTP site, I had no room on my hard drive to fit the image file (yeah, but what can you do?). So I started ferreting around for ISOs I no longer needed (as in, I’ve burned them to CD or DVD… you never delete stuff because it will eventually come back to bite you when you least expect it). Instead of finding them, I uncovered my “ps3ux” directory with Ubuntu PPC 7.10 in it. So, I decided to give it a try. Never mind that it favours Gnome (inherent homosexuality, see below), it probably wouldn’t log out all other users after ten seconds, and there are some kernel patches that boast wireless support.

A few hours later, we were up and running. So far, it’s beaten Fedora in terms of reliability, but wireless networking is still an issue. I’ve got a new kernel that I’m going to RPM and boot later (when people have stopped selfishly using the TV for “entertainment”…), so I’ll bring you an update on that when we’re there. As it stands, by the way, the wireless indicator LED on the PS3 lights up, but iwconfig is being a fussy bitch and the network manager says “no connection.”

True to my nature as a modern Computer Scientist, everything is better when it has Linux on it.

It wasn’t particularly difficult at all, it was a case of knowing the install command for kboot and finding the right files. That doesn’t mean, however, that it wasn’t time consuming. We had to find removable storage to backup the hard drive (for the reformat and partitioning), and that was a nightmare in itself. Our first choice (my ancient iRiver MP3 Player) was an all-round failure. The second choice was a laptop hard drive using my neat USB adapter (works for both data and power with a laptop drive), but Sony have neglected to support Microsoft’s totalitarian NTFS filesystem, so I had to relocate my files and reformat all twenty billion bytes… Anyway, eventually we backed up, reformatted, restored the backup and then got to the good stuff: installing the bootloader and slamming home the Fedora 5 Core (PPC) DVD.

At the moment it’s just a bash prompt without a lot of software, but I’m going to hit up some KDE (not gnome due to its latent homosexuality) later, get a neat desktop environment going on and then mount some network directories using Samba. Then comes the hardcore stuff; streaming video from my computer into the flat’s kitchen for some awesome TV action.

I’ll keep you all posted.