Ars on PS3 Linux
October 22nd, 2006 by CrusaderArs Technica’s current feature article is a look at Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3, whose existence was only recently announced. Included are comments from Terra Soft Solutions CEO Kai Staats and Enlightenment’sCarsten “Rasterman” Haitzler, which provide some additional detail regarding the feature set:
Staats feels that Terra Soft’s relationship with Sony has facilitated development of a well-integrated product: “Our work with Sony has granted us a unique opportunity to have in our possession beta PlayStation units (the same that the game developers have used) in order to work closely with the system to ensure a high quality end-user experience, from bootloader to halt, from installation to playing CDs and configuring the desktop.”
Will the high price of the PS3 deter interested users? It certainly deters me. Staats believes that the PS3 will provide a do-all set-top box, and he shared his own plans to incorporate one into his personal home theater: “I cannot emphasize enough that the PS3 is designed for Linux and [is] far more than a game box,” he said. “Personally, I plan to remove my home DVD and CD decks and use instead a PS3 attached with my home theater for DVD, CD, MP3, and home computer—attached to a 5:1 14 speaker system with HD LCD. Elegant, simple, and powerful.”
[...]
Haitzler acknowledges that e17 is still “pre-alpha” software, but feels that support for rapid application crash recovery diminishes the negative impact of the “few bugs” that still remain. Haitzler also points out that while GNOME and KDE have longer feature lists, they also have much higher resource requirements. Haitzler feels that the PS3′s 256MB of RAM will probably be insufficient for most users that want to run KDE and GNOME and have memory left over for actual applications. According to Haitzler, “e17 shines in raw efficiency” and “can do all its fancy graphics without Open GL, without Compiz, without Xgl, without massively fast CPU’s and tons of video RAM and high-end graphics chips.”
October 22nd, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Strange choice. Looks great and all but is not even close to as mature as lot’s of the bigger DE avalible.
October 22nd, 2006 at 4:11 pm
If you stop and think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Haitzler has tremendous experience in the desktop field (obviously), and you may or may not know that he also has a lot of experience working on embedded systems.
What it really boils down to is that what is needed here is a tight-knit team, with knowledge and experience ready to ‘pounce’ into it and get things done. I don’t know anyone of the people working on E personally, but it’s been said by prominent member(s) that e17 wasn’t completed yet *not* because it couldn’t be finished soon if they wanted to, rather they were still ‘fleshing-it-out’, you know seeing where to go, what roads to take, etc.
Also not to speak bad of the ‘G’ or ‘K’ teams, since they are good what they are good for (if you’re into them), but if you’ve ever had the displeasure of using (i.e.) QT-embedded on a handheld device then you’d know some obvious reasons (slow, fugly, etc.).
Furthermore if you examine the target [PS3] it’s realized that you don’t need or desire 20 different IM’s or email progs or browsers etc. Sure it’ll be open so you can [if you want], but wtf the ‘K’ and ‘G’ are getting way too long in the tooth on SO many levels. (On a side note, compiz/XGL = *bleh*, weak gimmicks IMHO.)
Just looking at e17 from ~20 months ago, already there were many many not just interesting things, not just usable things, but just plain “duh” things – that looking at them you should realize ‘hey why isn’t everyone doing this?!’. Example: compiled resources (config files, images (i.e. backgrounds), etc).
It is time to step out of the 1970′s and into the future…
-DigitalSin
October 22nd, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Come on now, running KDE on 256MB is not that bad.
October 22nd, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Why not go with something even lighter? Like a modified version of fluxbox or something like that. Won’t be as fancy, but it’ll be blazing fast and you will be able to dedicate the RAM/CPU to more important tasks. With all that left over power you’ll be able to fully customize it with conky and the works. Sure it’s more work, but I definately think it’s worth it.
October 23rd, 2006 at 8:40 am
Really it should be able to directly use opengl. No reason why it shouldn’t. E17 used to be the snazziest desktop out there until compiz was released. It’s still interesting but it’s taking a long time to creep into a full desktop environment.
Disclaimer: I run e17 on all of my boxes…