As I had thought sometime back i.e I might buy a PS3 when it comes out in India for both its gaming features as well as its Media center kind of capabilities (especially for my family, i.e easy to use) and more importantly for me its Computing capabilities.
Lucky me that I had to go to US for a short trip last month and in the process while coming back picked up a PS3 premium edition from atlanta (Just for Sony to know, I found 3 to 4 PS3s’ available at EBgames shop with the shop guy telling that its been there for some time and it is not moving, so can I look at getting around $3K or so wasn’t it what sony us president had told he would give people who find PS3 in stock for a long time). Thus I am saved from having to pay additional premium in India when it releases (when ever it is, no info from Sony about it still, this is bad) and also even thou sony doesn’t mention it IT DOES HAVE A UNIVERSAL POWER SUPPLY (ATLEAST the JAN2007 model which I brought), I took a chance (calculated) and it did run without requiring any stepdown transformers.
I will be able to experiment with its PSP interfacing capabilities, rather once I find time to upgrade my PSP to 3.x firmware obviously the non native way (i.e not direct upgrade because I love homebrew).
I tried installing Linux (the YDL version) and it does work. I have a problem with the mouse (rather a ps2 mouse through a USB to PS2 converter device) which I have to fix later. Otherwise it does run fine. Sometime later I would rather come out with a fully ramdisk (initrd) based small linux distro for it with some key utilities which I use. With it using kboot as its otheros bootloader, it shouldn’t be that difficult. Also as I already have native compiler of PowerPC running on PS3 I don’t have to mess with cross compilers also (not that I don’t like it or any such thing, just lazy these days).
If anyone is interested the kboot customisation for PS3 or rather the ps3 linux devkit full cd is available for kernel.org (as well from dl.qj.net, but qj.net had download issues, as it is not simple wget for qj.net links, and power was failing every time I was trying to download here, so making it hard for me to continue a partial download).
I tried Resistance and RR7, I liked both overall. However I did find that PS3 doesn’t support mp2 (not layer3 (i.e mp3) but layer2) decoding while a $50 (Rs2000) dvd player supports it. Also one more thing I wanted was a timed poweroff feature so that I could let it play some songs or so and after a given time it poweroff itself, I didn’t find this feature in PS3. It would be usefull if sony could add these features to PS3.
Also if sony could release direct dev tools for PS3 i.e not for Linux environment but for their native PS3 os, like MS then it would be even more fun. Either way I do appriciate Sony PS3 allowing linux to be installed i.e one of the reasons I bought PS3.
SONY ALSO Please do allow us indians to register on your playstation network with our indian address if you can. I legally brought a product from US on my own (also brought 2 game cds along with it, I think better than what most US and Japan customers have done on a average till now), but I will be using it in India, cann’t I register it with my Indian address (which you don’t allow for now in ur website).
HanishKVC's General Blog zone 