Your PS3 is one of the best gaming consoles on the market. Besides playing the most popular games such as Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, or Assassin’s Creed, your PS3 can be turned into a fully functioning, very capable home computer. All one has to do is install the Linux operating system in order to do this. Sony makes this perfectly legal to do and actually designed the PlayStation 3 with the idea that users could play games, watch movies, view photos, listen to music, and run the Linux operating system so your PS3 can be turned into a home computer.
Yellow Dog Linux was specifically designed for your PS3 so this distribution should be the first one you should look at when deciding on turning your PS3 into a home computer. However, most of the Linux distributions, at least the most popular ones such as Yellow Dog Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Gentoo, will work fine with your PS3 console. They will all offer home, office, and server applications, web browsers, email clients, and much more. In fact, the Yellow Dog Linux distribution comes with more than two thousand packages for you to enjoy.
Users should not worry about losing the PS3’s native gaming capabilities after installing Linux because you will create a separate partition for your Linux OS. The PS3’s hard drive comes as one big partition. Before installing Linux, you will need to divide this one partition into two partitions: one for your PS3’s native operating system and the other for the Linux operating system. Doing this, your saved games will be stored into the PS3 partition and every file and document you save while being in the Linux environment will save into the Linux partition. In other words, both the native GameOS and Linux OS maintain their won separate hard drive volumes to store its own data.