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Comment by Jonnax | Hacker News Reader

Did you actually run Linux on a PS3?

There was a lot of enthusiasm for Linux on the PS3 around release due to the Cell processor. While I doubt that many people who exploited this feature for research purposes were bitten by Sony's reversal, I would imagine that a handful of home users were (since they would have updated the firmware to play games).

That said, 10 years is an awful long time to hold a grudge.

Not really. It's taking a feature that he paid for, and it was really cool to have access to that processor. At least it would have been. I wasn't really into machines at that point, but it would have been cool.

I installed the yellow dog build, it was terrible because there was only 256mb of ram available for general use, and no low-level hardware access to video acceleration.

People complain about this like it was so awful they removed this feature, but TBH it was terrible and only designed so they could get around tariffs in some countries by calling it a computer rather than a videogame console.

actually YellowDog shipped a kernel build later that would map the 256MB of the GPU to be used as system memory (so 512 MB in total). Whether or not the whole system was "usable" depended on your need. Since yellow dog shipped with enlightenment, it was pretty usable. Of course, the whole system was only interesting to people interested in the Cell processor and wanted to code for it.

My brother did, and he used it daily until Sony took it away.

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