Well, there’s now a Home Beta Trial site for anyone with a PlayStation 3 hoping to get involved with a beta trial for the recently announced PlayStation Home.
Kotaku kind of assplode last night when they released a rumour about the forthcoming PlayStation 3 social networking features. Sony then blackballed them and they’ve made up now, but anyway, by the looks of things there are some really great features coming up. A number of other sites also let rip about the new features to be announced at GDC next week, but this bit was the juiciest:
An inside source close to Sony made a post on the IGN boards a few weeks ago talking about a new feature that Sony would be implementing. At the moment the feature is dubbed “Home”, and Sony has even secured a patent and logo for the name. The poster commented that this new Home feature would create a virtual home located in a virtual town, populated by the people on your buddy list. Your buddies can go inside your house when your PS3 is online, and you can go inside their house.
Your home will act as a storage of trophies, achievements, and other rewards that can be viewed by anyone on your buddy list. But, the most crucial aspect to the asset is that it’ll let people listen to audio on your HDD and watch videos from your HDD (you make the audio/video public or private). You’ll be able to play a host of mini-games like cards with your friends, and also have the virtual TV in your home display a video in your PS3. Lastly, the poster suggests that you can walk outside of your house and visit the Virtual Theater (you’ll get movie clips/videos here) and visit the Virtual Arcade.
Sounds great.
I spent around 5 hours over the weekend installing Fedora Core 5 Linux on my PlayStation 3.
After getting myself a 120gb Fujitsu HDD from OverClockers.co.uk, I made a 10Gb partition for the ‘second OS’, and set about the installation process. It would’ve been quicker if I hadn’t downloaded the wrong 3.4Gb file first, oops. But once I had the v5 torrent it took 2 hours to download and about 2 and a half hours to install.
For a free operating system, it’s great. Looks a bit too bit on my 42” Sharp 1080p LCD but still. Fedora Core 5 and the PlayStation 3 add on disk that it comes with give you a desktop operating system that has everything you need out of the box, including: full Open Office applications, A few web browsers including FireFox 1.5 (upgradeable to 2.0), Mail clients, IRC clients, Graphics applications, Photo Applications, DVD/CD players plus a multitude of server and database applications and a whole load more. Basically, everything you’d need.
I mostly installed it out of curiosity but now curiosity is driving me to investigate upgrading to Fedora Core 6 and installing Beryl. Which is very pretty indeed.
Update: Ok. So I upgraded to Fedora Core 6 before learning that Beryl won’t run on it. Doh. That was a waste of time…