IGN: Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 Hands-on Posted by XanTium | 2-12-2006 15:31 EST

From ps3.ign.com: [QUOTE] As it stands, the PS3 can make for a decent simple task computer, allowing you to check email and browse the web with relative ease. It's not perfectly suited for media playback yet for a number of reasons, what with less than ideal video support and a minimal amount of RAM, not to mention the hassle of having to track down codec packages on your own. These same issues can be applied to gaming and other related tasks as well, at least for now. We're hoping that the system will be able to make use of the other 256MB of RAM in there at some point in time, which will certainly boost performance. As it is though, it doesn't run too bad. We just wish that Linux was more user-friendly as a whole. Yellow Dog is certainly a nice flavor of Linux, though the base OS still has issues. If you're interested in messing around with the OS, be sure to read the setup and introductory documents it ships with. If you pay attention it's pretty easy to get up and running. Beyond that, you're basically on your own, though the future is wide open. [/QUOTE] Read More: ps3.ign.com (3 pages)

Lets hope we can use it to hack the sucker

Its becoming pretty obvious to me that the only reason Sony added the whole Linux thing is so they can avoid being taxed in the EU as a game console. They recently lost several court cases and had to pay hundreds of millions in back taxes owed on the PS2. They argued the PS2 was a computer, but it didn't fly in the courts there. They've added Linux booting to the PS3 to save money, not to give consumers more features. Limiting it to a little over 200mb of memory and not allowing access to the RSX basically cripples this feature to the point that its useless. Its too bad as this would've been a fantastic multimedia center had it not been so feature limited. Although, I guess Sony realized how much trouble they could be in had they not limited Linux access to the system as hacks would've occurred quite quickly. Though, hacks are still probably going to come through this avenue.

Some linux is better than no linux at all. It's not completely useless, just give it time...

so you cant use the video acell well i hate to tell you linux friggen sucks without dri its slow as hell your better just using the built in sony broswer for your email. its abought as good as xbox linux yea yea it has its uses but we all knoe how horrdily slow it can be couse x is running in framebuffer mode.

I prefer Sony to have focused on making the console less expensive, and better than a 1 year old Xbox 360 than to have enabled this "feature." So, in the end we have a system thats not even as good as a, according to Sony, non next-gen system. Yeah, having it boot a useless version of linux that is completly crippled is better than not having any linux. Try booting Windows without video drivers and see how great it is.

You having your own opinion is fine, but the ability to boot into linux is not something Sony "focused on" for a year to the detriment of developing other aspects of the system. The PS3 isn't a "1 year old xbox 360" - you should spend some time using one before you judge it so harshly. I own both an xbox 360 and a ps3, and both of them are very good machines, each with their own advantages.