Linux on the PS3 has a pretty interesting history. If you’re familiar with the History of the PS3 you probably know that when it was first released in 2006 Sony shipped it with support to run other operating systems through a feature called OtherOS. OtherOS allowed people to install operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD on a second partition on the PS3 hard drive.
In 2010 Sony removed OtherOS support in firmware 3.21 because of “security concerns” AKA some people were starting to use it to look a bit too close into the PS3 internals and figure out how to pirate games. With custom firmware it’s possible to use OtherOS on modern firmwares so that’s what we’ll be doing here.
This is the continuation of part 1 about the Xbox 360.
How about we link to people that actually developed the patches and such to get this working instead of a random person that can’t compile a kernel without dropping the F bomb?
You can say fuck on the internet. Nobody’s going to tell.
To what end though… the linked article is a nothing burger with some F bombs.
Link to the people actually sending in patches to keep this stuff working the actual heros.
Pretty sure I’ve seen these posts on Reddit. Looks like the community is the one walking him through everything, and I don’t see him giving them any credit for their technical knowledge in these articles.
Pretty much this… if you want to actually covert this topic point to the guys that did the work.
Never mind the rest of it, in both articles this guy says that he disregarded the GPU as unimportant, unusable or he just didn’t even try.
Then what’s the point of the article? It’s a game console. While I think it’s a crying shame that planned obsolescence leaves us with all this e-waste and generally encourage efforts to repurpose these systems on general principles, this isn’t really that if it ignores so much of the hardware capabilities, is it? Personally I think that if a console of these later generations is left unsupported after a predetermined period of time, the parent companies should be required by law to release a method which allows full hardware support for something like Linux and these systems should get a second life where they can run something like Batocera Linux or LibreELEC and still be useful. Since most of this stuff is a matter of the gaming servers being taken down and EOL’d there really shouldn’t be any controversy about this. The company abandoned the hardware.
The only reason I leave them an out on releasing support specs is because I understand that they may be using licensed hardware in these things and legally cannot compel the OEM to release, but something that allows a custom install with full hardware support should be possible even if it requires tainted kernels with binary blobs. Just something that allows these systems to be useful rather than e-waste.
bornagainenguin,
I am also affected by hardware that still works but ceases to be officially supported and I have no recourse to make it usable again because it’s all proprietary and sometimes even vendor locked using DRM. Because of this, EOL hardware typically becomes trash and that’s that unfortunately.
Since we’re talking hypothetical laws, I don’t see a reason the law couldn’t go up the chain to mandate that hardware be officially supported or else entitle owners to the hardware specifications. Contract terms that disagree with the law are typically void and companies would ultimately be compelled to follow the law. There probably would be a sunset date for contracts existing prior to this law, but new contracts would certainly be expected to follow the law. However this is just theoretical and I don’t envision this ever actually happening IRL. I think it’s wishful thinking and proprietary products will continue getting thrown out because in today’s culture profits are valued more than product durability and sustainability.