Art Of Geek

Linux on the PS3: Sony’s master plan or recipe for disaster?

Holy penguins Batman! Terra Soft Solutions has just announced plans to release Yellow Dog Linux for the Sony Playstation 3! For those not familiar, Terra Soft got it’s claim to fame for it’s Yellow Dog Linux distribution for PowerPC based Macintosh computers, and even did some good business selling Macs with Linux pre-installed–the only company to ever get authorized by Apple to do so.

After Apple dropped the Intel bomb at WWDC 2005, Terra Soft has stayed commited to the Power CPU architecture. They seem to have done well for themselves by switching focus away from Apple hardware towards IBMs Power and PowerPC based servers. No doubt putting Terra Soft on the short list of favored linux developers for the IBM/Sony/Toshiba developed Cell platform. Yes, this is no unauthorized hack boys and girls, according to the Terra Soft press release, they’ve got Sony’s blessing (and even their support) to release their Linux distro for the upcoming PS3 game console:

Under basic agreement with SCEI, Terra Soft was granted a unique opportunity to develop and bring to market a complete Linux OS for the Sony PLAYSTATION 3.

The video game console market is like the cell phone and razor blade business. Sell your expensive console at a loss to gain market share, and make back the money on the sale of video games, services and accessories. This is the reason why Microsoft and Sony have been so protective of their consoles and tried to thwart attempts to install unauthorized home brew software on their consoles. If you are losing say $100 per console sold, and 10,000 people buy your console just to use them as an inexpensive Linux web server, then you’re going to lose $1 million on those sales, that you’re never going to recoup from those customers. Likewise, video game piracy is a big threat to profitability as well.

So what does Sony have up their sleeves? Reading the Terra Soft press release further provides some insight into just that very question.

In development of Yellow Dog Linux v5.0, Terra Soft integrated and enhanced code from Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Sony Group, and Fedora in order to offer the following:
- kernel 2.6.16
- gcc 3.4.4 and glibc 2.4
- Cell SDK 1.1
- OpenOffice.org 2.0.2
- FireFox 1.5.0 and Thunderbird 1.5.0
- Nautilus 2.1.4
… and a suite of Personal Accessories, Development Tools; Sound & Video, Internet, and Networking applications.

There’s no doubt that the idea is to turn the PS3 into a full fledged personal computer with all the basic apps most users would need/expect. Whether you’re an institutional or corporate client who wants to set up an inexpensive supercomputer cluster, or just your average home user who wants to surf the web, send/receive email and work on some Office documents, Yellow Dog Linux has everything you need right out of the box to get started.

But Linux isn’t ready for the home user, right? Will your average PS3 gamer have any clue of how to install and setup Linux on their PS3? Well Linux has come a long way over the last couple of years. Distributions like Ubuntu are making inroads into the desktop Linux market, and Linux adoption continues to grow as every new release gets more and more refined. Usability is near on-par with Windows and installation is as simple as anyone could expect. But when a company develops a Linux distro for a very specific set of hardware, it makes it easier to focus on improving ease of use. According to Terra Soft:

A single-click installer enables absolutely anyone to install without instruction. Post-install, the default suite of applications presents an intuitive, self-guided means of exploring Linux without the confusion of multiple applications in the same family. An Advanced installer mode enables selection from greater than fifteen hundred packages, as is expected from a complete Linux distribution.

Sounds like they’re catering to everyone from your average Linux novice to advanced users as well. This is a very good thing. While Microsoft is busy patching loopholes to prevent people from hacking the XBox 360 to run Linux, Sony seems to be embracing this open source OS completely. This has the potential to greatly shift the value proposition in the PS3’s favor. Now, not only are you getting an HD capable next gen game console AND BluRay movie disc player, but a personal computer with no limits on what you can run on it. It’s now obvious why Sony made sure every PS3 configuration includes a hard disk drive.

If you think Linux on the PS3 is all about attracting users though, you’re sadly mistaken. It’s probably more about developers than it is about end users. Linux has an absolutely huge following in the developer community. After all, Linux is all about developers working together to create great software. By fully supporting Linux on their upcoming console, and being the only console that does so, Sony will instantly gain the interest and support of a huge developer community, and a huge library of software which will be a recompile away from running on their hardware. Trust me, every Linux developer who has even considered buying a video game console will be counting their pennies to get a Playstation 3.

So the big question still stands. How is Sony going to make money off of the PS3? My guess is they figure they can afford to lose some money from the odd purchasers who buy a PS3 to only run Linux, because they can recoup more money from consumer PS3 sales than Microsoft can from the XBox 360 since they will also make money from BluRay movie sales, and licensing of BluRay and Cell technology to other companies. To Sony, the PS3 is an important part of winning market share in several different markets that they can’t afford to lose in. With this latest announcement from Terra Soft, Sony is finally starting to show all their cards. If Sony sees demand for Linux on PS3, can dedicated Cell based PCs and workstations be far behind?

I was sitting on the fence about which next generation game console I planned to buy (if at all). This announcement has just made my decision a lot easier for me. I currently have an XBox with a mod chip installed so I can run XBox Media Center on it for playing downloaded video content in my home theatre. But the XBox can’t handle HD video playback at 720p or higher, and my 50″ LCD projection TV is crying for HD content. Given that Microsoft is making the XBox 360 even harder to hack than it’s predecessor, I started to consider using a Mac mini to do the job of playing back video, with it’s great Front Row remote and on-screen interface. But if I can just install Linux on a PS3 then for around the same money as a Mac mini I’ll have the media playback capability, plus a sweet ass gaming console and a BluRay movie disc player. Sure, it won’t be able to run Mac software, but if I really want to do that in my living room, I’ll just use my Mac notebook. That’s what notebooks and WiFi are for after all.

Add comment October 17th, 2006

Safari 3.0: Leopard can’t come too soon!

If you’re like me, you spend a crazy amount of your waking hours in a web browser. For me, that browser is Apple’s Safari, and despite some enticing features of other browsers for Mac OS X (there are quite a few), I stick with Safari because I love it’s uncluttered interface, excellent support for web standards and Apple look/feel that the other browsers just seem to be lacking.

Well, a few weeks back a video showed up on YouTube purporting to show off new drag-able tabs in the upcoming version of Safari in Mac OS X Leopard, but there was much reason to be skeptical, given all the fake Leopard screenshots and movies that made the rounds leading up to WWDC’06. Well kids, it looks like drag-able tabs are coming to Safari 3.0, as well as a couple of other really cool features, according to an article on Musings From Mars blog. The article includes videos demonstrating the three features, so I highly recommend you check it out!

Drag-able tabs, much improved in-page search and resizable form text fields! Very nice. Now the one feature that I’d still like to see is true zooming in and out on a page. Not simply changing text size, I want all page components to scale proportionately. Opera is the only browser that I know of that does this. Very handy for people with lots of screen real estate who wants to enlarge a page to make it more easily read from further back, or those with notebooks who want to be able to see more of a web page on the screen at once. Give me that and site-specific settings, and I’ll be a really happy camper. Of course, drag-able tabs, improved in-page find and resizable form text fields go a long way to helping me forget about the other stuff.

Add comment October 5th, 2006

Zune Update

In my previous article about Microsoft’s latest attempt to catch up to the iPod, no pricing, ship date or official dimensions were available. Since then, more concrete details have become available. First off, Microsoft has finalized the price for their 30GB POS device: $249.99 US. That’s just 99¢ more than the equivalent capacity iPod. The device will go on sale on November 14.

Zune Marketplace will sell music for 79 Microsoft points per track, which works out to 98.75¢, since 80 Microsoft points will cost you a buck. So for all intents and purposes, songs are the same price as they are on Apple’s iTunes Store (99¢). There will also be an all you can eat subscription service for $14.99/month. This is more expensive than some of the PlaysForSure subscription services available from other vendors. Microsoft Marketplace will launch with only music for sale. Video will come down the road.

The shipping Zune player is considerably bigger than I had estimated based on the publicity photos previously released. Of course, any time you have to estimate, you’re bound to be off a tad, not to mention publicity photos could be misleading. My guess was that the device would be between the size of an iPod 30GB and iPod 80GB. The reality is it’s bigger than even the 80GB iPod, so owners of that wonderful device can still brag they have 50GB more storage AND a smaller device. The actual dimensions are 4.4 inches x 2.4 inches x 0.58 inch with a weight of 5.6 ounces. That makes it 13% bigger/2% heavier than the iPod 80GB, and 45% bigger/30% heavier than iPod 30GB it’s trying to compete directly with.

So all that extra bulk must be for a bigger battery that will beat the iPod’s battery life, right? Wrong. According to Engadget:

They were pretty tight lipped about it, but our new pal and independent analyst for Directions on Microsoft, Matt Rosoff, let us know that according to his contacts, with wireless off we can expect a 12 hours of music playback at 128Kbps, 3.5 hours for video playback, and 4.5 hours when running a slide show. Compare that to the 30GB iPod’s 14/4 hours and the 80GB iPod’s 20/6 hours, and it’s a little difficult to fully envision the payoff for that added thickness and height.

So iPod 80GB owners can also brag they have nearly double the battery life of the Zune as well. We can only imagine what the battery must be like with WiFi turned on.

Does Microsoft really think people will buy a bigger, uglier device that has worse battery life JUST because it has a bigger screen and gimmicky WiFi that is next to useless? Anyone serious about video is going to prefer the higher capacity and longer battery life of the 80GB iPod, and the casual video user will really notice how much smaller/lighter the iPod 30GB model is. Microsoft is going to learn a hard lesson from the Zune this holiday shopping season. But hey, they have to spend that cash hoard on something, nothing says it has to be successful. One thing is obvious: the Zune isn’t even fit to compete against other products on the market from the likes of Creative and iRiver, against the iPod it’s DOA.

[Edit 10/3/2006, 11:18 am: Changed "for all intensive purposes" to "for all intents and purposes". Thanks to reader "Poppycock" for catching that error.]

2 comments October 2nd, 2006