PS3 HD to include Linux.

#1 The PS2 Linux project was pretty damn cool, too. And officially sanctioned as well!

EDIT: Hmmm...It's most likely Linux... Well, we can hope.

#2 But not having a hard drive included in the system is lame for indies hoping to see something sort of like XBox Live Arcade on a PS3. People just don't buy add on devices like that. The XBox Live kit was sort of an anomaly in that respect.

#3 With wireless network gaming built into the PS3, one can easily imagine a downloadable game service to rival X-box Live Arcade. I have no idea what it's for but GG's demo of Torque running on a PS2 wasn't for nothing, I hope. As indies we can benefit from this sort of competition by selling our games on a non-exclusive basis. If there was only one hardware vendor dominating the whole show, they'd be monopolizing the market prices.

#4 @Joshua - I find it hard to believe of a viable download-able games on a PS3 with no hard drive shipping with the PS3. As an add-on you might get some penetration, but it won't be as good as the 360 which will offer download-able games with a stock console 4 to 6 months before the PS3 is available. It's some competition, but not as much as i'd like there to be.

#5 @Tom, true, wont' be nearly the penetration, but we won't have to worry about 'license' issues like we will with the 360. It's not like they can keep you from distributing software for Linux. With the 360, your game STILL has to be approved by MS before you can 'distribute' it.

Maybe I should have said homebrew instead of indie(very similar, but different).

#6 Heh... too many Joshuas. I was responding to JoshuaD's post above.

But on your point, yes, for the handful of people who will run Linux on a PS3 you could try to sell them games. Still in general i don't believe the Linux market is very viable for games. I cite Loki Games as an example and they had AAA titles to offer people. Maybe a GG guy could back this up with the ratio of Linux/Mac/Windows sales of Marble Blast or any of the GG titles. My guess is less than 1% of GG game sales are for people playing on Linux.

#7 If it has no built-in hard drive, it will be a pathetic service. I hate to be all pesimistic but the install base is going to be tiny. Look at Xbox Live Arcade. It becomes that your audicence is a percent, of a percent, of a percent. For XBLA it was: X% of Xbox users have Live, Y% got the XBLA CD, Z% put the CD in the drive, then you could count on N% looking at your game. For PS3, it will be even worse because the XBLA CDs were free...Hard Drives won't be. Will the software be on the PS3 or will you need a CD? Will all the consoles have the online service? Will it be free to access?

I dunno, I really keep getting less and less impressed with the PS3 the more information comes out about it. As always the games will be the deciding factor, but (at the risk of excessive, and almost baseless speculation) it seems like Sony is losing the race and it's not even started yet. They are releasing their console SECOND, not first...and yet their hardware is inferior. They say their online service will be better but they really have nothing to back this up at all. Live was already good, and the next version is shaping up to be mindblowing, and that's just going on the things that I know (and we aren't privy to everything). Beside that, they have been doing their usual Sony BS sessions. My favorite quote was the trash-talking about how Microsoft was inferior because they were aiming at beating the PS2...I'm really confused by this. The Xbox was superior to the PS2 in all ways except one: It had Microsoft on the top instead of Sony. That's not going to save them this time. Sony really better have something up their sleeves, or it's going to be like the PSP vs Nintendo DS.

As far as Linux goes...we can all sit and smoke the Linux weed day in and day out, but it's not even good weed. Linux is a pain in the ass to support, Linux users don't pay for anything, and at the end of the day, you are catering to a tiny, and shrinking percent of the PC market. We'll continue to support Linux here at GarageGames, but only because we want our engine to be as portable as possible, and every platform we can get it on is another helpful learning experience for portability. Linux is dead to the desktop market, as far as I am concerned, and when the full results of the Apple on Intel thing come about, Linux will finally start going the way it should have gone years ago. There will always be the hardcores, but why would anyone want to slog through obfiscated installs, piss-poor user interfaces, and mountains of crap just to change a simple setting when they can use MacOS, and have all of the good things and none of the bad. No kernel/driver garbage, no unsupported nonsense...it just works.

Besides that, Microsoft is pretty committed to bringing indy games to the 360. Why would you want to deal with trying to develop on PS3 Linux (try it on PS2 Linux sometime...it's like building a house with chopsticks) and at the end of the day distriubte through homebrew channels...all so you can have no limited distribution or something? You are limiting yourself! Especially when the alternative is to work with Microsoft, get pimped on their service, and get known for being able to deliver on a 360...PS3 Linux is a dead end street. I expect it to work better on the PS3 than it did on the PS2, only it didn't work on the PS2. We had over 100 copies of Marble Blast sold on XBLA in the first week on Live Arcade. It's not a ton, but like I said before, the audience was X% of Y% of Z% of N%. 360 is a totally different story.

#8 @Tom - hehe, yea, as I said, I probably should have said homebrew.

@Pat - You just had to crush my dreams, didn't you :P I used to use Linux extensively, but now only use it for 'emergencies'(it still makes an awesome system recovery tool, provided you know what your doing)

#9 I had/have the linux HD for the PS2 and it was a bitch do do anything with. I love linux but I dont think its something that will provide that valuable and viable of a tool for development on a console. Its definatly something cool to play around with, but nothing that I could wrap my head around. Liek pat said:

Quote:Why would you want to deal with trying to develop on PS3 Linux (try it on PS2 Linux sometime...it's like building a house with chopsticks) and at the end of the day distriubte through homebrew channels...all so you can have no limited distribution or something? You are limiting yourself! Especially when the alternative is to work with Microsoft, get pimped on their service, and get known for being able to deliver on a 360...PS3 Linux is a dead end street.

I whole heatedly agree and its nice that sony is and has tried to take the steps toward indie development flexibility, its not worth it.

#10 @Pat

Well said you summed up my thoughts exactly there on this subject.

There is way too much smoke and mirrors coming from Sony and not enough hardcore tangable proof. So what if it runs Linux, personally the only thing I have seen Linux good for is running a few instances of a dedicated server thus saving my team support money on server costs, aside from that it can go back to where it came. Linspire however is pretty cool, great company to deal with and even better users, I would support them in a heartbeat.

#11 I came off a bit harsh, but Linux has pissed me off as of late. Well the Slashdot crew has at least. I think Linux is great for servers, second to none, in fact. I love the Linux shell environment (BASH for me) and some of the stuff that has come out of it and the OpenSource movement. Ruby on Rails, PHP, Apache...all great things, but I don't like the viewpoint that Linux can do everything better, it really can't. I agree, Linspire is cool, but most of the Slashdot people hate it. I'm not sure if any of this is a coherant argument, I made the mistake of setting the admin password on the wireless router yesterday, and I can't remember it for the life of me.

#12 The only thing Linux is good for on the gaming front is dedicated servers. Period.

#13 Why would a thread that started with "PS3 HD to include Linux" end up thrashing Linux?

#14 Another website has a nice quote that sums up sonys decision on the HDD. The PlayStation 3 won't be coming with an internal hard drive, because

"no matter how much [capacity] we put in it, it won't be enough."

Are they really not intelligent enough to realise that even having just a 10gig HDD would open up a whole host of possibilites compared to no HDD? Wouldn't it have been a better strategy to have a small HDD ship with the PS3 to get people to realise how they can benefit by a larger HDD and to go out and buy an upgrade/add-on?

Downloadable content is all well and good, but you're already cutting the potential market by requiring people to first buy a hardware addon. Those who buy an XBox will have this oppertunity out the door (especially by having live access free on a weekend).

Hardware Spec for Spec I've no idea which console is ahead, I havn't really followed it. However the XBox is winning for me on the grounds of shipping with a HDD alone (assuming the specs are roughly similar). So for me, the decision will probably come down to, what else can the console do? With Media center capability, extra downloadable game content such as new levels and games etc The XBox is ahead imo.

#15 Well, the Slashdot crowd can piss off ANY person with even the slightest amout of logic reasoning. Personaly I'm a huge proponent of multiple OS's, and the whole 'right tool for the right job' thing. If SCE were to use the Linux kernel and a CUSTOM UI system, and strip out all the extraneous 'fluff' that most Linux distros come with, they could have something quite usable.

Of course given some of SCE's recent decisions, I don't know if they would do such a thing. Yea, their reasoning behind not including a HDD is rather bizzare.. I find it funny that even NINTENDO will have more built in storage than the PS3 out of the box.(via their 512 megs of flash)

#16 @Gary

I wonder what it is exactly that Sony feels is inadiquate about hard drive sizes? Chances are Sony wont find someone to make 10GB drives, hell even MS has troubles with this for the first generation of Xbox. It's so cheap now for these guys to get 40GB drives or something much larger, most console users would have a difficult time filling it up. So I call BS on Sony and hope that they will come out and be honest with their reason for not doing this.

#17 It is a strange decision, the extra space for game saves alone makes it worth having a drive in there. Letting people copy their music onto it and download add-ons to games they own such as new levels. It just makes sense to have a hdd in there.

If they sell the console as a loss leader like microsoft does, then perhaps it would have made it too great a loss to risk compared to the potential benefit they see from it? Who knows. Still, I think microsoft will push the HDD side of things heavily when it comes to marketing. Mainly from the downloadable content point of view, not the "you get a hdd" direct :P

#18 @Pat says "more pain killers, for my knee please" ;)

#19 Personally I will not buy a Microsoft product, aside from the occasional OEM of Windows.
I've convinced my friends and loved-ones to boycott Microsoft. I got my boss to replace
his X-BOX with a PS2, my mom gave me her beloved PC to use as a Linux server so she
could buy herself a Mac laptop and not feel guilty. And it feels good. Don't buy their substandard
junk, convince everyone you know not to, and pretty soon we might have a bit more
competition for them. Just a thought. Sorry for the rant =)

Microsoft will continue to pump as much money as it takes at this console market. Not to make money, but to push everyone else out of the business. MS uses (and has used) this same strategy in all their businesses. They know that if Sony puts a 40GB
HDD in their console, they can just shell out the bucks to suddenly offer the 80GB Xbox2,
regardless of their profits or loss. They could drop the cost of their system at their whim,
just to throw a wrench into the Sony machine. Microsoft is capable of (and likely to use) whatever
underhanded dirty business they can devise to keep their competition down.

I just want people to think about it a little before they jump on the Microsoft bandwagon.

P.S.: Consider the games released by Bungie before and after joining Microsoft.
Microsoft has the money, but they don't have a soul. Don't let Bill Gates pull you into the
bowels of hell. Support everyone else.

#20 I don't think you should compare the slashdot crew to the Linux crew. People that actually POST on slashdot are kids or idiots with lots of free time that like to show off they are better because they don't use windows. It's just stupid, I've been using linux for 7 years and I NEVER posted in slashdot, and so do all the great people I know. If you go to places full of Linux experts, like could be #debian on freenode, no one even reads slashdot, it's full of idiots.

Now to bash Linux just because you wanted to is pretty lame. As you said later there's many things Linux is good at, and if you get used to it, it makes a great development system too. The gnome desktop is way much user friendly than Windows ugly interface. As for what you mention on configuration, I've seen some distros that have every single tool to configure anything, you don't have to even touch the console or a text file. One of them is Mandrake, other one is Fedora, There's also SUSE. I personally prefer editing text files so I keep using Debian, but there's alternatives. There's gnome-system-tools, there's lots of stuff. Personally I find Windows' control panel daunting, I can never find the stupid keyboard language setting, not to mention that they keep changing things from place between every damn windows version.

I do agree that there's no market for games practically in Linux, but there's lots of DEVELOPERS using Linux and TGE to make games, much more than you could think of. It's free, it's stable, it's fast, it's a great platform to develop ON. Windows is a must support platform for deploying games though since it owns most of the market.

As for the MacOS stuff, if they support MacOS with common intel pc hardware then you WILL have driver/kernel hell. The only reason why MacOS just works is because their hardware is standard. So either they will make MacOS only work with Macintosh computers, which then be exactly the same than now, the price will be high, only them will sell them, etc, It makes no difference at all. But if they do release it as a product to replace Linux/Windows on any PC then they will have to start supporting drivers for every damn piece of hardware out there.