red wrote: > Hi > > I am wanting to get a media centre. > > Ubuntu > Wine to run spotify > Blue tooth > Wifi > Blue Ray > Store my music and torrent on > Possible burn media > card reader > > Would PS3 do this> > > Not very well. I got an 80GB PS3 for the kids for Christmas and decided to install Ubuntu on it. The problem is the PS3 hardware is limited when running Linux, you're limited to 256MB Ram and the video is via the framebuffer and very slow. It's not so bad for say, Firefox and possibly playing music but not much else.
You could at a pinch I guess connect a USB DVD/CD writer and a USB card reader (I believe only the 60GB model has the card reader) but I wouldn't recommend it. You'll also struggle with Wine as the PS3 has a PowerPC based CPU not x86 as used on a PC. So I certainly wouldn't go out and buy a PS3 for just these things. If you were getting one say to play Bluray films and games then they are great. I tend to now do media playback on my PS3 using it in the PS3 mode using the Cross Media Bar (XMB) which is what the PS3 runs by default. I run PS3 Media Server on my laptop running Ubuntu and it will serve up media to the PS3, transcoding when necessary. I also play Bluray movies on it, and occasionally music and a little bit of BBC iPlayer and web browsing. It's worth also bearing in mind, the newer slimline PS3 won't run Linux. Only the original 'fat' PS3 consoles will run Linux. I settled on Xubuntu after trying Yellowdog. Although the fat PS3 consoles only tend to have 20GB, 40GB, 60GB or 80GB hard drives, it is possible to replace the hard drive with a bigger drive, although on the PS3 by default you can only either allocate 10GB to Linux and the rest of the drive to the PS3 OS, or 10GB to the PS3 OS with the rest to Linux. I hear from a friend it is possible to take drive out and repartition it manually but I haven't tried this, mainly because I'm finding 10GB is more than enough for what I want. So don't get me wrong, the PS3 is a great console, but if you don't want to play games, then you might be better off building a media PC or maybe getting one of the little Acer Aspire Net Top PCs and a separate Bluray player. Rob -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
