seanius.net/ blog/ 2008/ 10/   debian and my PS3

when i haven't been blowing up crates of gold bullion or benevolently guiding cute little blob creatures, i've been tinkering with a debian installation on my PS3.

first installation

following the well-beaten path, i first created the usb/kboot bootstrap as documented here, followed by using a custom d-i image from keshi.org.

knowing that this would give me a relatively old system, and that i'd like want to dist-upgrade my way to testing/unstable, i opted for installing a minimal system without gnome/X, and therefore when the installer was done was left with useable headless system.

so this worked rather well, though i wasn't entirely happy about the experience. for the most part, this was because of the multi-step nature of the process, a few non-intuitive "bumps" in the process, and because it required going "outside the distribution" for different things. namely:

dist-upgrading to lenny/sid

so next i went for the dist-upgrade. the upgrade itself went okay, except that a new version of udev isn't fully compatible with older kernels like the installed one. since i wasn't happy running an unofficial/unmaintained kernel anyway, i took a stab at installing the debian 2.6.26 kernel.

unfortunately, through no fault of my own this was greeted with epic failure.
discussing the issue on some mailing lists along with the proper google incantations i found the problem, and i was then pointed to a temporary fix by members of the debian kernel team.

further complications were introduced by the old version of the ps3pf-utils package not being able to reboot back into the PS3 OS on a new kernel (caused by the change in name of the root device from sda1 -> ps3da1), but fortunately i still had the old kernel handy (with a broken udev, but that could be worked around too).

installing X/gnome

apt-get install gnome

that was easy :) after that to get the full 1080p running i just needed to pass a hint to the kernel in the kboot configuration. Of course I don't have a mouse plugged into the thing, and my crappy usb keyboard's cable is just too short to sit comfortably at the couch, even with an extension cable. so it's generally easier to work from my laptop for the anyway...

however, i tried to play a simple (non-HD even) video file and was greated by a system that was unusably sluggish and a hung desktop. very strange... maybe it was because i was running x11vnc on the desktop, but i can't be sure. anyway, i'm going to put my head in the sand wrt that specific issue and instead focus on tackling some of the issues i brought up earlier.

next steps

a brain dump of what's to come: