Tales Of The Yellow Dog pt. 3: Finding Bootloaders and Yellow Dogs
Welcome back for another edition of Tales of the Yellow Dog, where we dig deep into the nitty gritty of installing Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3.
Our past installments have covered backing up the hard drive and quick formatting the drive to prep for Linux installation. Since the drive has been formatted, it is ready to receive the Yellow Dog, so let’s hunt it down.
To install Linux, you need two bootloader files and the proper OS. The bootloader files are needed during installation to tell the PS3 where the new OS is located to begin the installation. The bootloader files are located here. The files are called otheros.bld and otheros.self. I placed them on a USB drive in the main directory, so the PS3 would see them easily.
I installed Yellow Dog Linux version 5.0.2, which has the wireless internet support that was absent from previous builds. You can acquire Yellow Dog in a variety of ways, either pay for the DVDs from Terra Soft Solutions for $49.95, or hunt that .iso down yourself and burn it to a DVD to install. Linux is open source, so either way is legal.
Finding the .iso file is a tricky one. I had to do many google searches before I found some foreign sites that hosted the 3.3GB download. Initially I tried a bittorrent file, but that was taking too long, so I opted to look for a zip, and found it. Once the .iso file has been downloaded, the next step is to burn it.
Most of the installation guides are written from a PC perspective, but I don’t have one so I’m going to cover this step from for a Mac user. I am running Mac OSX Version 10.4.10 on a Dual 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4 with 1MB L3 cache per processor and 1GB DDR SDRAM. With the Disc Utility program that comes with Mac OSX, I was able to burn the downloaded .iso file onto a DVD.
Disc Utility is located in Applications-→Utilities → DiscUtility. Place a blank DVD into your drive and in the left column you should see the .iso file. Click on it then click the Burn button. If you don't see your .iso file in the column, simply grab the file on your desktop and drag it to the left column.
Once the .iso has been burned and you have your bootloader files ready on a flash drive, you are ready to install. So join us next time for the actual installation of Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3.
Toots
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany, Video Games on 24 September 2007
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