Philip

I decided to crack out the PlayStation 3 again and try and get GNU/Linux up and running now that the Cell SDK 3.0 has been released by IBM for Fedora Core 7. First step is getting the latest Fedora Core 7 PPC DVD. The second step is figuring out how to make the DVD boot properly so you can actually install Fedora. The issue is that when you boot, by default it reverts to the ridiculously low resolution of 480p which isn’t large enough to see where to click. To resolve this at the kboot screen simply type in ‘cd mnt/root/ppc/ppc64′, then ‘kexec -f –initrd=ramdisk.image.gz –command-line=”video=720p” vmlinuz’ to boot in 1280×720p mode which actually lets you install. (Thanks to Robert Rose for figuring it out here).

After that it’s pretty smooth sailing, however you should get the latest Cell CD from here to install the latest kernel which is snappier than the default Fedora one. After that, it’s installing the Livna repositories here to get the usual packages that aren’t in Fedora on like VideoLAN and MPlayer without a lot of pain going through dependencies. So far from my last tests with YDL the PS3 is able to play back H.264 and MPEG-4 media fine at SD (ie, 720×576 or below) sizes, as soon as scaling kicks in for 720p/1080i things bog down as there’s no SPU support. Oh well!

Now that I’ve got the Cell SDK on, maybe it’s high time to optimise the MPlayer software scaler…