[thistleknot]

Well I just did what you did (in reply to comment http://ps3crunch.com/asbestos-instal...#comment-16274), and boy was it a pain in the ass, took me about a week.

First thing is first. Your going to need an external hard drive.

I used the updated files “improved-ubuntu”, which boots up into a gui.

then I installed gparted

then I created an ext4 partition on my external (actually I did a lot of trial and errors (I never got mdadm to work, I HAD TO DD /dev/md0 INSIDE THE BOOTED OS), I never succeeded in creating 1 img file that would boot (I did later, see below!) without adding any other img files in the same dir, if I had just one, it wouldn’t boot by itself, saying something about raid 1 with 1 device was unusual, but if I wanted to I could use –force, but the mdadm command wasn’t available, so I skipped that).

I even tried downgrading to 3.15 to get the “other os” option, which didn’t show up on my ps3 slim.

So the command looked like
dd /dev/md0 /dev/sda4 (my ext4 partition)

it takes a while.

Then after that. Make sure you don’t have any .img files on the root of your dev_hdd0

boot up with lv2patcher

the commands were
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt
exec switch_root /mnt /sbin/init

it will pop up with an error, but will eventually boot up into a gui off the external!

My next project is to get a limited version of grub to run from the rescue shell so I can try to boot from the ppc/ps3 ubuntu iso and install my own os from scratch.

Update:

I'm not having much luck with grub. Get messages about open firmware bios not supported/found, something to that effect.

To help the OS speed up though, I recommend assigning a pagefile to the dev/ps3db 2.1GB FAT drive that is on the internal hard drive (DON'T FORMAT IT AS SWAP! I DON'T KNOW WHAT KIND OF HARM THAT MIGHT CAUSE YOUR PS3, you can use the mkswap and swapon commands to assign it in it's native state to be a swap device). That way your external HD is ONLY being used for the OS. Also, of course mount the PS3Vram as a pagefile (which should have a higher priority number assigned to it, see my prior posts if you have questions on that). That should make up for not being able to run the OS on the internal HD, especially since you can use it's full write/read speeds for the pagefile.

[ibivibiv]

I'll definitely be watching this thread super close. I've been hoping for a better running xbmc or boxee than the one that ran on yellow dog. Hopefully at some point one will show up as a signed app. If $ony is reading this, YES some of us liked linux for PS3 and used it; and YES some of us (since you took it away) are using the hacks as of late for something other than ripping off your lame gaming lineup. I bought 2 games for PS3 when I got my box originally: Uncharted 2 and Little Big Planet. Mostly I wanted a cool bluray player that I thought would run XBMC that also 'oh by the way' played games too (bonus). What I didn't know was it was crippled hardware linux with no 3d support so XBMC never really ran exactly right. Kind of sad that a group of 'hardened evil cyber criminals <sarcasm>' are doing a better job of delivering on a promise that the original manufacturer could not.

[thistleknot]

Dude!!!!

I got it working as a single file on the internal harddrive.

Basically, you take the file and put it on your /dev_hdd0
and at the bash shell you mount it to /mnt

mount -t ext4 -o loop /mnt/disk/ext4.img /mnt
switch_root /mnt/ sbin/init

and voila. You have a single .img file mounted and it boots!

I got read rates of... (testing now)... min: 3.5MB/s, max 64.9 MB/s, avg: 36.4. The img must be tearing up read speeds. To be honest, external USB was giving me wack specs too (10 min, 30 max). Access time is 40.2 ms. Access on ext usb was 19, if you had a usb flash drive with the filesystem, I'm sure it would run a hell of a lot better.

I have one last trick up my sleeve. I'm about to get a new hard drive and I'm thinking of wiping out my ps3 back onto a 120GB and trying to DD it to a 500GB retaining the 120GB partition, then seeing if I can create another partition on the hard drive to hold linux. I've read you can grow UFS but can't shrink it. This way I can get a linux partition on my ps3 without the otherOS option, but I read somewhere the PS3 OS reads the sn of the hd.

What's great about this method, is you can have multiple img files on the root of your hard drive and pick which one you want to run.

I guess if you want, you can create scripts on dev_hdd0 which is normally mounted as /mnt/Disk

PLEASE NOTE: this did not work with asbestos 2.1, I had to use 1.5 (1.5 is for ubuntu, 2.0-2.1 is for debian)

[madshaun1984]

You'll have a problem doing the last part of your post, When a new hdd is inserted in the ps3, the ps3 wipes any partitions on the hdd, and formats it as a whole. So you'll end up with 437gb available for GameOS).

What would be nice, (and the ps3 has an inbuilt utility to do it but someone needs to figure out how to use it), is to partition the PS3's hdd, after its initially formatted (aka VFS).

[thistleknot]

How can I mount an iso and boot from it? Anyone have any idea? I want to mount an iso in the asbestos bash shell.

I'm thinking chroot?
Then go to a grub folder and run grub?

Or what about lilo?

What about kboot.conf? Can I use kboot.conf to do a network install?

What about tftp?

I'd really just prefer to rip an img from a cd and somehow boot from that within asbestos.

Update:

Well, I started following some instructions. TFTP failed to start. Well xinetd failed to start. Even after following the instructions. Damn. Back to the original 10 ubuntu files, hopefully I can install something from scratch onto a flash drive.

Update:
Well, I got TFTP up on Ubuntu finally,
this site helped
http://e2e.ti.com/support/embedded/f/354/t/61432.aspx

I was reading two different dir's on what to put in the /etc/xinet.d/tftp
I guess the protocol and port are important

So now to see if I can tftpboot from asbestos, which according to marcan, was the original intention of asbestos.

Except, 1.5 doesn't have any tftpboot bash command.

I'll figure it out sooner or later.

I might have to use 1.2

[andrewrich]

just a quick Question how do i go about uninstalling this from my ps3

thanks in advance
andrewrich

[japsander]

Originally Posted by andrewrich just a quick Question how do i go about uninstalling this from my ps3 thanks in advance andrewrich

delete the img files from the hdd


Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

[andrewrich]

Originally Posted by japsander delete the img files from the hdd Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

thanks i thought is was that just didnt dare in case i was wrong

[Oogudy]

thistleknot, please could you tell me how to combine the 10 img files?

Thanks,

Oogudy.

[vaalir]

i'm going to try this eventually when i get my ps3 back, but i wonder if i could do a sudo apt-get kubuntu-desktop? would that work? as it seems graf_chokolo won't release his work, this seems like the only viable option for linux on ps3. i can aslo see that this thread haven't had much action since i've been here last. people not happy with how this works perhaps? i need to tinker with something, it would be cool to use my ps3 as a computer also. i have a desktop and a laptop. but i want to play with my playstation, dammit!