May 22nd 2008 - PS2 showcase

echo hi

Today we had the PS2 Linux showcase on the networking lab
I was carring the chubby PlayStation 2 together with my 5 inch B/W TV which I used as a monitor because the console has a non standard VGA output called SyncOnGreen (SoG) which is not recognized by many of the monitors.

I introduced myself and I begun to set up the environment (put cables, connect devices together and power everything up), after powering up the devices I almost forgot to put a little fun into the presentation with two litthe penguins, one is a PenPen figure (from the Evangelion Series) and the other was some other penguin I found in a store some day xD.

I booted up the PS2 Linux System from the Memory Card and since there is no xinit script the system started into the expected state (console mode) I made my custom scripts to show the different window managers prestent in this distribution. Basically the scripts just write some string into a file (using echo and output redirection to a file, nothing special, basic stuff actually) and with the xsession file we may call startx and the selected window manager is loaded.

After this scripting and loading proceess I showed the (very old) gnome desktop environment, executed a little few programs (gnome-terminal, gimp, mozilla and gedit) Then I realized the system uses GTK1 (the system is old xD) I havent seen that square-shaped menus since the time I read some Fedora installation handbook back in highschool.

After the presentation of the programs I wrote a program in C, the most basic program (hello world) to test the gcc compiler, it worked as expected. after this my friend Luis asked me if the system had python console, since I don't code in that language (at least not yet) I wasn't aware if that module was present, then I told him to give it a try.

He tried it and yes there was a python console, he also wrote a program and runned it.

What follows from here?... Well the next thing to do apart from keep resarching is getting the other nodes for the system and plenty +/-R media in case +/-RW media doesn't work with the console drives.

I want to thank my networking lab teacher Tania Arteaga for giving me the chance to show the work I've done, I also want to thank Luis for the photos he took of the showcase and to everyone who attended the event.

(this is the top of the iceberg, it might not be an impressive ammount of work since it was basically a installation of the system, but there are more things to come).

May 6th 2008 - PS2 showcase announce

echo hi

Today I agreed with my network lab teacher to bring the PlayStation 2 two weeks from now to the lab for a Linux system demo. The date time are as follows:

Thursday May 22nd 2008 11:00 AM (GMT-6).
Laboratorio de redes y seguridad
Edificio de posgrado. Facultad de Ingeniería CU
Primer piso edificio de posgrado frente a Unica

Everyone is invited to assist to the live demo of the PS2 Linux

Hope I can get the system configured to that time in order to run Gnome as the default window manager instead of the default WM.

I also want to configure and compile a couple of things like C/C++ and OpenGL programs (glxgears would be nice). To show that even if the kernel is old (kernel v2.2) and there isn't quite much memory space (32MB total system RAM) the ps2Linux embedded system can do many things

While I "play" and prepare the PS2 for the showcase here are a couple of related links

http://www.blackcow.org/ps2linux/
http://phatbox.sixpak.org/ps2linux/

lol both have http://something/ps2linux/

Hope everyone can be there

byte[] & EOT