Linux on PS2?

[Van Halen Man]

I know it is possible to install Linux on a PS3, and I heard that there was a distro. for PS2. Is this true?

[a12ctic]

I know it is possible to install Linux on a PS3, and I heard that there was a distro. for PS2. Is this true?

google is your friend.

[Van Halen Man]

Wow, that was quick. I just posted that about 40 seconds ago.

[bigtomrodney]

Yeah there was a development kit for Linux on the PS2 released by Sony. It was very expensive and it runs dog slow. I think the PS2 was only 333MHz anyway. If you have the PS2 network adapter you can fit a hard drive into the system and you might be able to download the installation .iso's for Linux somewhere. I know it wasn't very successful anyway.

[Van Halen Man]

It was only 333 mega hertz?? Then why cant average computers cant run ps2 isos with emulators? I would assume it could have much ram with that little processing power.

[bigtomrodney]

Actually let me correct myself -

The specifications of the PlayStation 2 console are as follows, with hardware revisions:
Emotion Engine CPU
Graphics Synthesizer GPU
I/O Processor (PlayStation 1 CPU) I/O Bus

* CPU: 128-bit "Emotion Engine" clocked at 294 MHz, 10.5 million transistors
o System Memory: 32 MiB Direct Rambus or RDRAM (note that some computers use this type of RAM)
o Memory bus Bandwidth: 3.2 Gigabyte per second
o Main processor: MIPS R5900 CPU core, 64 bit
o Coprocessor: FPU (Floating Point Multiply Accumulator × 1, Floating Point Divider × 1)
(from this wikipedia article)

It was actually clocked at 294MHz but it was a 128MHz processor, a main MIPS 64bit CPU and a few other coprocessors. I guess it is the usual problem of hardware/architecture emulation that causes the slowdown. It's a completely different setup to our usual x86 idea of computing.

[Van Halen Man]

Ok thanks. Well I dont want to spend a ton of money so do you know it it is possible to get emulators like Zsnes on a PS2?

[bigtomrodney]

If you get Linux installed it should only be a matter of building it from source. The requirements from memory for Zsnes (and a few other emulators) was just a build environment and the SDL development packages so it should be straight forward enough. The network adapter is quite cheap now anyway, you could probably get one for about

[benjamin20]

zsnes is still heavily x86 assembly based i believe. snes9x is probably what you would have to use.

[cayalee]

the problem with it is the lack of system ram, you're not actually able to do much with it except browse the web on dillo.
xbox linux on the other hand is a bit better featured.