Its Official! The PS3 will support Linux and Homebrew!
蘇伯方
Its Official! The PS3 will support Linux and Homebrew!
Posted May 15, 2006 at 08:52PM by Pranav T. Listed in: Interviews, News Tags:
PenguinWell, this bit of news will surely excite all the PS3 fans.
Kawanishi, Network system development manager at SCE, revealed at E3
in an interview that the PS3 will be supporting Linux! Although it has
been known before, this interview just confirms the fact.
English Translation:
The PS3 will come standard with a functional Linux Operating System as
well as compilers and other tools. This will give a vast playground to
all the programmers on the PS3. This means that the PS3 will support
all USB drives. Even back in the PlayStation generation, there were a
lot of creations by homebrew developers. On the PS3, this will be much
more.
If you think of the PS3 as an ecosystem, the game studios will still
follow the current routine, to treat the PS3 as a game console, and
develop games while paying the license fee. However, in which form can
the individual developers participate best in the software development
for the PS3?
"To request license fee from the individual developers is a little
hard (laughing). When a game studio buys a license to develop for the
PS3, SCE side must supply the studio with necessary tools and SDK
libraries, as well as all kinds of technical support. Since the PS3 is
using Linux, the license fee will not be required for developing on
it."
Won't this be a challenge to all the programmers since they won't have
any knowledge technical knowledge of the hardware?
"Based on Linux, it is the OS-side hardware layer which is managing
the Cell processor related issues, which makes the SPE also opened to
the developers. However, I don't think that the PS3 as a game platform
business, and the PS3 in the Linux world, will be merged into one."
So, what does this mean for the average PS3 user who doesn't
understand jack about Linux? Well, for starters, this is as good as an
official announcement that Sony and PS3 will not block homebrew in any
way, unlike the PSP. And the fact that homebrew developers will be
welcomed with open arms and not boxing gloves, like on the PSP.
Seeing the PSP community, it's quite obvious that Sony would've
learned a lot. A lot of homebrew on the PSP is stuff which Sony should
have taken care of in the first place. And if they couldn't, they
shouldn't have blocked it.
I'll skip the "Linux for Dummies" explanation. I assume all of our
readers have at least heard of it sometime in their lives. And many of
you must've tried it too. Linux on any platform is a dream. You can do
so much with it. For programmers, this means that they won't have to
code on the PC and transfer to the PS3. For the average user, Linux
will open a world unimaginable before. Almost everything you can do on
a PC, you will be able to do here. Media Centers (MythTV anyone?),
Cool Desktop environments (KDE, Gnome), Browsers (Firefox, Mozilla,
Opera), and lots more.
I just hope that they don't tie it down and cripple it. The PS2 Linux
'project' wasn't as successful because of the same reason.
No other details were revealed. So we still don't know if they will be
using a popular distro or make one of their own (possibly deriving
from another distro?). Plus, we don't know if the PS3's actual OS will
be Linux itself, or whether it will be a dualboot environment. I'd
guess that it's the latter.
Using Linux as the PS3's OS would mean a lot of headaches for them, as
well as the GNU/GPL guys. Plus, using Linux as the main OS would mean
possibly crippling it, so that it doesn't run code which they don't
want. I'd rather not get into speculation mode, seeing how big
companies have a knack of letting us down.
This bit of news finally brings something positive from the PS3 side
on the table. Sony had been getting a lot of flak lately. Hopefully,
this bit of news will help the PS3 redeem itself.
Click here to read the original interview (In Japanese)
I'd like to thank our resident blogger and translator, Jeff Chen, for
translating the relevant part. I owe you one man :)
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