Any value in a PS3 with Linux?

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I just got a PS3 and it came with Linux on it. It was from a person who no longer wanted it & was going to toss it.

Any reason to keep it as is or should I just return it to stock state? IIRC upgrading the firmware removes the Linux capability...
 
Unless it's worth more to flip to someone who cares, I never saw much value in installing Linux to them. Doesn't it still have the original PS OS on it as well so it dual-boots so you can still play games on it like normal, right? You just won't be able to update any games since it'll prompt you to update the console any time you connect online.

I would just update it if I planned on using it at all. My PS3 nowadays still gets used to this day by my daughter to play Little Big Planet online with friends. Amazingly there's still lots of people on there.
 
Unless it's worth more to flip to someone who cares, I never saw much value in installing Linux to them. Doesn't it still have the original PS OS on it as well so it dual-boots so you can still play games on it like normal, right? You just won't be able to update any games since it'll prompt you to update the console any time you connect online.

I would just update it if I planned on using it at all. My PS3 nowadays still gets used to this day by my daughter to play Little Big Planet online with friends. Amazingly there's still lots of people on there.

I didn't see a dual boot option. Is there supposed to be? It just booted to Linux.
 
I didn't see a dual boot option. Is there supposed to be? It just booted to Linux.

I'm not sure, I guess it actually replaced the stock OS then. I wonder if it's actually installed on the HDD then or the internal storage. What happens if you pull or replace the HDD and turn it on?
 
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I'm not sure, I guess it actually replaced the stock OS then. I wonder if it's actually installed on the HDD then or the internal storage. What happens if you pull or replace the HDD and turn it on?
I believe if you try to install it on another system it will need to wipe and reinstall. HDD are encrypted to only the the PS it was originally installed on.
 
I may jsut replace the internal hard drive with like a 240GB ssd & start fresh.
 
Is that PS3 one of the ones that has backward compatibility with the PS2 and PS1? If so, that's probably of interest to some folks.
 
I believe if you try to install it on another system it will need to wipe and reinstall. HDD are encrypted to only the the PS it was originally installed on.

Yeah, was just wondering if the actual OS portion of the console was on the HDD or not and what it did if you tried to boot it without the HDD installed. I know they're tied/encrypted to the console though, as I had my old 80GB PS2 BC PS3 die on me and couldn't recover any of my saves from the drive for my new PS3 slim, which sucked.

I may jsut replace the internal hard drive with like a 240GB ssd & start fresh.

Well an SSD would definitely be wasted on an old console like that unless it's an old one that's only like SATA1 anyways or something.
 
Yeah, was just wondering if the actual OS portion of the console was on the HDD or not and what it did if you tried to boot it without the HDD installed. I know they're tied/encrypted to the console though, as I had my old 80GB PS2 BC PS3 die on me and couldn't recover any of my saves from the drive for my new PS3 slim, which sucked.



Well an SSD would definitely be wasted on an old console like that unless it's an old one that's only like SATA1 anyways or something.
I was thinking more from a power/heat/reliability standpoint. I mean the drive in the thing is 10 years old.....
 
Reposting this response from the thread in the linux forum.

I'd say that at this point you'd be better off turning it into a normal PS3 and then installing a custom firmware. There's a lot of great homebrew for it, it makes for a great emulation machine, and it's still the best non-UHD bluray player on the market. Also, if you have a model that natively supported linux, then it is also likely to be a model that had PS2 backwards compatibility. Without knowing the model I can't say for sure, but considering you'd in theory have one machine that can play almost everything from three generations of PlayStations, I think you'd be better served using it as one.

Also, while I can't say for sure, I'd imagine that software support under Linux isn't going to be that great as you'd be running most if not all software on just the Cell's single 2 thread general purpose PPE PowerPC core, with 256 MB of system memory. So, I don't see it being all that useful outside of maybe running as a server for something on your network, which frankly a raspberry pi would probably be better suited for at this point considering performance and power usage. If the Cell's 7 supplemental SPE cores aren't taken advantage of by software the performance is pretty poor.

TLDR, open the sucker up, give it a good cleaning, repaste the CPU and GPU, flash the official firmware on it, and then flash a custom firmware or PS3HEN on it and take advantage of the homebrew and emulation support. Plus, PS3 games are dirt cheap at this point. I recently got a PS3, and I picked up the Last of Us at Gamestop for 3 USD. Lots of great games on the system, and most of them are very cheap.

Hope this helps.
 
PS3's with older firmware hold more value than newer ones, especially if it's a PS3 with hardware BC.
 
PS3's with older firmware hold more value than newer ones, especially if it's a PS3 with hardware BC.
True, but if the intent is to keep it and get some non-monetary value out of it, then cleaning it up and upgrading/updating it makes more sense.
 
You should send it to Sony, they love that kind of out of the box thinking with their hardware. It is still their hardware...
 
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