[ydl-gen] So, PS3

[Ted Goranson]

So let me get this straight. Is all this correct?

The PS3 is heavily subsidized by Sony, so is a lot of hardware for a 
good price. The Cell Broadband Engine in more or less the same form 
is either available or will be from others like IBM and Mercury in 
high end machines.

Since the PS3 has Blueray, its not a bad deal if you want one of those players.

It comes without a mouse, keyboard or monitor, but with one of those 
gamer controls. That means if you wanted to use it as a general 
purpose computer with YDL on it, you'd need those, or KVM to what you 
have. But in that case, YDL doesn't support the graphics hardware 
acceleration. I assume that YDL can deal with both Mac and PC 
keyboards?

So if you were like me, you might consider the PS3 as a candidate for 
a headless station in a wired Gigethernetwork. Probably you'd buy the 
cheaper of the two and put a large hard disk in it.

In this case, you could use ordinary desktop applications that aren't 
graphics-intensive. I suppose that means that KDE (which I prefer) 
would be slow. Since we'd be depending on TerraSoft to build and 
maintain rpms for the yum archive, we'd have to go with what they 
decide is in their interest to support. And we have no way yet of 
knowing that, do we?

Assuming that YDL for PPC and Cell have the same applications 
support, and going by the info on their site, we know the "featured 
apps" don't include Emacs or KDE, for instance, but they are on the 
"included apps" list. One can assume that featured apps will be 
maintained more than included apps, and the track record of TerraSoft 
in maintenance overall has been poor for YDL 4.x.

If you had a headless YDL PS3 networked in (which I assume must be 
possible), you can play Blueray movies, have a credible Linux setup 
for ordinary things and explore programming the Cell.

Programming the cell seems limited in certain respects. A C compiler 
(octopiler) is available. And it appears that some Eclipse-based Java 
tools are as well. But if you wanted to explore some languages not of 
interest to Sony/IBM/terrasoft , like lisp for instance, you'd be on 
your own.

Do I have all this right? Its hard to sort out the facts.

Best, Ted



-- 
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Ted Goranson
Sirius-Beta