Submitted by Yellow Dog Linux 5 has been announced. Surprisingly, it will first be released for Sony’s Playstation 3, and then later for PPC Macs. Yellow Dog Linux 5 for the Playstation 3 will use E17 as its desktop environment (YDL’s page on E17), which will be a boost to E17’s adoption rate. Sony had mentioned the PS3 would include Linux in some capacity, but it has been unclear how Linux would fit into the rest of the system.
Great news. Hopefully this will be a good platform for a free XBMC replacement.
Does this mean you’ll be able to run emulators and homebrew on it? If so, this might be worth the $600. For that, you get a machine that does 1080p, can play pretty much every arcade & console game ever made up to (and possibly including) the Dreamcast, along with PS2 & PS3 games. And just for bonus, there’s probably some DVR capabilities and a blu-ray player in there too.
Edited 2006-10-16 22:44
If it’s anything like the Linux version that came out for the PS2 though, Sony will prevent use of the optical drive and the 3D hardware. They advertised this as an anti-piracy measure, but in reality it was so that people couldn’t avoid having to buy an expensive PS2 dev setup in order to write decent games for the platform.
Still, arcade emulators and the like should still work, and the Cell might be powerful enough to emulate a Dreamcast purely in software. Plus it’ll (aparently) have built-in PS1 compatability, so it’s not all bad
What the hell are you talking about?!?
I own a Linux PS2 and can access the hardware without problems.
What I cannot do is access it directly. But Sony does provide libraries to access the 3D hardware.
Please base your comments on facts not rumors.
I’m wondering whether they chose E17 for technical reasons (less RAM?) or just for the look and feel.
Because it is the best user desktop experience going bar none.
now there is a high profile ‘respected’ distro that includes it by default, its about time I gave it a go. We’ll see if your right 🙂
wonderful coup for a company alot of people were writing off not all that long ago!
(although apples switch to intel did finally put to rest my consiricy thory that the company was an apple front to test the linux platform(only company allowed to install their own OS on apple hardware))
I’m not actually an enlightenment user, though I have compiled and used e17, but this is quite the news to see. It’s nice to have a somewhat prominent distro go out on a limb like that and step out of the KDE/GNOME desktop mold. Terrasoft really needed to do some thinking with 1) apple dropping ppc and 2) (though you hear less about this aspect) fedora, which it’s been built off of, now having it’s own ppc version.
I’d say targetting PS3s and switching to enlightenment is about as a different a direction of thinking they could have done (not to mention the work they’ve been doing with the HPC and bio stuff and such), while still being a dedicated PPC-only distro.
Terrasoft really needed to do some thinking with 1) apple dropping ppc
PPC was not only used by Apple. IBM still use them.
and 2) (though you hear less about this aspect) fedora, which it’s been built off of, now having it’s own ppc version.
Yellow Dog is Fedora based distribution. Having an existing PPC version of Fedora actually simplifies Terrasoft tasks so they can fine tuning the source. The fact Fedora was used for CELL development is a bonus for them so they can apply their skill on PS3.
Edited 2006-10-17 00:38
The balls! The audacity!
Seriously, here’s to YDL for stepping out and doing something really interesting. Enlightenment — cool. I hope this is also the default when they release YDL 5 for Mac.
It’s been a while since I’ve actually bought something from Terrasoft. I think that will change. What to do with that spare G4 just became apparent.
Those of us using PPC Macs should probably make a point to support PPC Linux vendors. We’re may need them someday.
the announcment says “coming in Novemeber with E17”
haven’t you guys been waiting for years for this moment?
Go Enlightenment ! Happy for them
& also E17 & Yellow Dog will make a very sexy combination on a playstation
& I dont think the playstation lacks RAM .. or does it ?
Im not a gamer at all .
Only 256MB of XDR DRAM for the Cell and 256MB of GDDR3 for the Nvidia GPU.
I might actually buy one now. Have a fast home computer which will probably be able to run games for every game system ever eventually
it’ll end up with emulators for all of the last gen systems like the n64, gamecube, ps1/2, dreamcast… woohoo!
It’s not clear if this means the PS3 will come standard with yellow Dog installed or not. If its preloaded that would be huge, but if it’s just an add-on that would install after buying the system, and not really officially supported by Sony, then it’s not really that big of a deal
Exactly. And if the PS3 includes some other distro preloaded, then no one will care about Yellow Dog.
this is pretty cool – but yellow dog fans waited around 8 extra months for 4.0 to come out passed its initial release date – i don’t think 5.0 will be any different.
I think the power of Enlightenment is that you can completely retheme its look. This could see it adopted for other such projects.
I don’t like the default E17 theme that much, but I like the window manager functionality it offers and probably a nice theme will come along by the time E17 is released… I was hoping it might be sometime this year, but perhaps I was optimistic. Next year then 🙂