Booting from an external USB drive does not appear to be supported on YDL 6.0 - 6.1. It's possible to install to an external drive, but you have to make some changes after installing for it to boot.
See here:
http://lists.fixstars.com/pipermail/yel ... 22119.htmlThe steps in that message appear to be well written out as far as what commands you use, but I haven't tried this myself.
lilmario215 wrote:what size partition should i create for the YDL os? If so can some one possibly point me in the direction of a read-me or a walk-through. I have a 500GB IOmega
This depends on your intended use of both YDL and the Game OS side. If you were able to successfully install to and boot from the external drive using the steps above, you could avoid reformatting the PS3's internal drive at all. If you were to use the default parition setup on the external drive install, you'd have a small /boot partition, a huge / partition, and a 512 MB swap partition on the external drive. None of it would be accessible from the Game OS since YDL doesn't use a FAT32 partition and the Game OS can only read FAT32 formatted drives.
If you just want to play around with Linux a bit to "get your feet wet" I'd install without using the external drive at all (don't even plug it in to avoid mistakes), using a 10 GB partition for YDL and the rest to the Game OS (on your internal drive). Then you could use the external drive with a FAT32 partition and be able to access it from both Linux and the Game OS.
If you can give us an idea of what you plan on using your PS3 for in terms of running Linux and playing games from the XMB/GameOS it would help us make a recommendation.