PS3 as a HTPC, Close but no Cigar

The Home Theater Blog took Sony's bait and decided to install Linux on PS3 and see if would make a decent HTPC client. Myself, I had visions of at least a Sage Placeshifting client working on it. However, it looks like media operation under Yellow Dog Linux is pretty much a dud. I guess the hardware is a bit to new to have solutions. As time goes on, I hope to see more homebrew solutions pop up.

Home Theater Blog

More specifically the PS3's GPU and highly touted cell processor aren't fully utilized under a native Linux operating system. I'm not sure of it's the threat of piracy, open competition from Linux game developers, some other unknown motivation or just the fact that the Linux community hasn't had enough face-time with the PS3 to code new solutions, but thus far there doesn't appear to be a way of directly accessing the PS3's RSX GPU by means of an OpenGL driver. In addition; apparently only the main core of the cell processor is utilized under Linux (presumably the part that most resembles a PPC processor) combine this with the fact the PS3 only has 256MB of RAM and its easy to see how the PS3 as a HTPC might not be all its cracked up to be.

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