On Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:06:16 -0500 Ted Goranson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> It comes without a mouse, keyboard or monitor, but with one of those 
> gamer controls. That means if you wanted to use it as a general 
> purpose computer with YDL on it, you'd need those, or KVM to what you 
> have. But in that case, YDL doesn't support the graphics hardware 
> acceleration. I assume that YDL can deal with both Mac and PC 
> keyboards?

Mice and keyboards are cheap enough, and at a pinch you could plug the
PS3 into a television.  But this is a straw man argument, any new
computer will require keyboard/mouse/monitor if you don't want it for a
headless server.  Count them as part of the overall cost depending on
your needs.

> So if you were like me, you might consider the PS3 as a candidate for 
> a headless station in a wired Gigethernetwork. Probably you'd buy the 
> cheaper of the two and put a large hard disk in it.

Last time I checked there where other differences, so YMMV.

> In this case, you could use ordinary desktop applications that aren't 
> graphics-intensive. I suppose that means that KDE (which I prefer) 
> would be slow. 

Um, KDE is slow anyway.  :-P

> Since we'd be depending on TerraSoft to build and maintain rpms for
> the yum archive, we'd have to go with what they decide is in their
> interest to support. And we have no way yet of knowing that, do we?

As with any linux distro, you are free to compile anything from source
that you want.

> Programming the cell seems limited in certain respects. A C compiler 
> (octopiler) is available. And it appears that some Eclipse-based Java 
> tools are as well. But if you wanted to explore some languages not of 
> interest to Sony/IBM/terrasoft , like lisp for instance, you'd be on 
> your own.

A C compiler is all you need to compile interpreters and compilers for
other languages, even if you have to compile some other language first
(C++ maybe).  If you are interested in exploring other languages, then
you would be more than capable of performing the usual three step that
is required to install things from scratch.  Since Cell technology is
also aimed at the scientific community for super computer use, many
obscure languages are likely to be of interest to Sony/IBM/Terrasoft.

I understand that the library used to run code on the Cell co processors
was designed to be language agnostic.  So I don't see any problems with
using it from whatever language you choose to use.

When creating a linux distro based on some other distro that has been
around for a very long time, you would expect all sorts of strange
languages to creep into the mix.  Emacs is likely to be in there, so
lisp will likely to be in there.  B-)

Since YDL 5 is based on Fedora Core 5, PPC Fedora Core 5 packages can
probably install quite easily.  Fedora Core is the community version
of Red Hat, so PPC Red Hat packages will probably install quite easily.

On the other hand, it would not surprise me if you could install PPC
RPMS from other sources, and even .debs.  There are rather large repos
out there of such things.  Lots of them for Fedora Core / Red Hat type
systems.

Judging by what I have seen on some web sites, it should be possible to
install other PPC based distros on the PS3, but that is off topic for a
YDL mailing list.  B-)

People that want to explore obscure programming languages should have a
minimal amount of technical knowledge, they can head out on their own
without any hand holding from Terrasoft.  Heading out on your own is not
any harder than it would be on any other linux distro.  Linux is not a
closed source, proprietary, locked down to one vendor kind of OS, there
are very many choices, some of them very easy to implement.

It is very early days yet, don't go inventing reasons to not use it.
If you are unsure, adopt a wait and see approach.  The PS3 and the Cell
are interesting collections of hardware, people will do interesting
things with them.  The PS3 is cheap hardware, lots of people will do
interesting things with them.

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