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…
My Sony Ericsson k800i started playing up recently. A known bug with the Firmware, when trying to use applications it would simply say ‘Unavailable’ or something like that. Anyway, rather than send it to Orange for repair I thought I’d investigate fixing it myself. And well, I did. I was so pleased I thought it worth sharing with fellow owners of the phone:
1. Go to www.wotanserver.com and buy some account credit
2. Download the Wotan Client
3. Follow these instructions, they’re fairly simple
Once you’ve done that, your phone will have the original firmware it was meant to have. It’ll even have a software update option to upgrade the firmware directly from Sony Ericsson, as and when updates become available.
Oh, and download MyPhone Explorer from the MyPhone site. I can honestly say it is the most awesome software I’ve had for a phone. It lets you back up your text messages! (for me, this is a novelty having never investigated before).
Thoroughly recommended anyway.
Also recommended are the following applications: Google Mail Mobile (go to: www.gmail.com/app on your phone), Google Maps Mobile (go to www.google.com/gmm on your phone) and Opera Mini (go to: operamini.com on your phone).