Working with Yellow Dog

IGN has an article up featuring the ins and outs of working with Yellow Dog on the PS3. Most of the article talks about how to get the OS installed into their console, and since we think it’s safe to assume that our readership is already well-informed about that process, we’ll skip those parts and we’ll relay to you their take on the working with YDL’s applications on the PS3.

What’s interesting about the post they’ve got is that they claim that’s it’s all been generated and posted using YDL.

Basic Use – The interface should be similar to the experience you get when using a Windows or Mac system. The E Shelf (the main user bar) appears by default on the top center of the screens and from there you can various applications.

Networking – The PS3’s Ethernet port works without any setup, aside from maybe popping in an IP address if you need to. Wireless is a different issue, however. WiFi isn’t automatically detected, and while you can go and manually add a wireless adapter, the OS doesn’t try to help and choose which brand it is. So if you aren’t all that savvy, it’s going to end up a guessing game.

Get the rest of the article after the Jump!

IGN has an article up featuring the ins and outs of working with Yellow Dog on the PS3. Most of the article talks about how to get the OS installed into their console, and since we think it’s safe to assume that our readership is already well-informed about that process, we’ll skip those parts and we’ll relay to you their take on the working with YDL’s applications on the PS3.

What’s interesting about the post they’ve got is that they claim that’s it’s all been generated and posted using YDL.

Basic Use – The interface should be similar to the experience you get when using a Windows or Mac system. The E Shelf (the main user bar) appears by default on the top center of the screens and from there you can various applications.

Networking – The PS3’s Ethernet port works without any setup, aside from maybe popping in an IP address if you need to. Wireless is a different issue, however. WiFi isn’t automatically detected, and while you can go and manually add a wireless adapter, the OS doesn’t try to help and choose which brand it is. So if you aren’t all that savvy, it’s going to end up a guessing game.

The Apps – YDL comes with Firefox for browsing, Thunderbird for email, Gaim for instant messaging, OpenOffice for all your business/publishing needs, and GIMP for editing images. It also has Titan media player, and a short list of mini games and accessories.

What’s annoying is that plugin support in Firefox is sketchy to non-existent and Flash doesn’t work because there isn’t a Cell-supported version for now. YouTube will have to wait folks. Also you’ll have to track down all those Titan plugins yourself and install them so that you’ll be able to play most media formats.

Video, Audio, Memory, and Processing – The sound chip of the PS3 is automatically supported so that’s a big plus. As expected the NVIDIA RSX graphics chip isn’t fully supported. 3D stuff is entirely unsupported at this point although it is said that full support is in the works.

The PlayStation 3’s 512MB is split in half, with 256MB of GDDR3 RAM and the other 256MB in XDR. Yellow Dog can only see one of these two halves and IGN reports that they’re not entirely sure which half is being used by YDL. What’s sure is that the system actually only has access to 196MB of RAM.

Launching applications isn’t instantaneous, but it isn’t all that slow either. Launching a brand-new session of Firefox may take five seconds or so, but once it’s up everything is fairly speedy. Hopefully a fix to let the system access all of the 256MB will be made. If that’s done then everything should become much faster.

There you go folks, that’s the short take on their long feature. So far it looks like the main issues that people have to work around or develop work-arounds for is the GFX support and a means to access the rest of the RAM. If people figure those two out, then maybe we’ll start seeing jaw-dropping stuff on the PS3.

Via IGN