hcubed wrote:Thanks, Paul, for your help. Here's what motivated my question, which may shed light on what I want to do and why.
It seems (to me anyway) the future of Linux on PS3 is quite uncertain. I have YDL 6.2 installable on storage media, so I could always reinstall the OS. The other night I struggled through getting VLC 0.9.5 working. I finally got it working, though, using ps3bodega repo and stumbling through some dependencies by trial and error.
I'm concerned that I'll get certain extra software installed such as VLC (and dependencies), have things pretty much the way I want them, then maybe a power outage or hdd failure or some other thing causes me to have to reinstall. So I reinstall the OS, but maybe then the niche of PS3-Linux fans is so small and/or the end-of-life is far enough in the past that there are not repos to get things even back to the way I had them before. I want to guard against this.
Well - that's the issue, isn't it? Luckily, Linux on PS3 isn't Cell specific - we're running generic PowerPC code. But - I don't think the future of PowerPC Linux is looking too rosy.
Since I use Fedora Extras/Dribble/Livna, I'm pretty sure that (most) of those will be around - but I can't guarantee anything.
The other big issue with Linux on the PS3 is the non-standard hard disc. Based on the clarification you provided above, I would normally suggest that you connect a second hard drive to your PC's IDE controller and use the
dd command to xerox the drive. That's nearly impossible with the PS3 - due to the PS3's weird internal disc structure. You can't swap drives like you can in a PC - at least not easily.
In your case, I would recommend using
dd to archive to a file on a USB external hard drive, instead of imaging to another disc. An example that backs up a CD ROM to a file is:
- Code: Select all
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/sam/myCD.iso bs=2048 conv=sync
You would replace /dev/cdrom with the PS3's hard drive, and /home/sam/myCD.iso with the target on the USB drive. I'm away from my PS3 right now, so I can't supply the actual syntax.
WARNING:
dd isn't for the faint of heart. If you mess up the syntax, you can erase your drive. If you decide to use this, be careful and double check your command line before you press ENTER.
hcubed wrote:I was surprised to read what you wrote about RPMs not remaining on the hdd for very long. I'm not familiar enough with YDL or a yum-based linux to know how that works. It wasn't long ago that I learned how to do what I'm asking in Ubuntu, but YDL is not Ubuntu.
It's not surprising really. Once an RPM is installed, it includes instructions on how to uninstall it as part of the installation. There's no real need to keep the RPM file itself around locally - at least as far as YUM is concerned - since the repo has the master copy.
hcubed wrote:P.S. The yellowdog-board has been very helpful to me and I was thankful when I found an organized community that included YDL-PS3 users.
Thanks! We do try to help!
Cheers,
Paul
P.S. Some folks claim that, if you are very careful, Linux on the PS3 sits at the physical end of the drive and isn't encrypted like the rest of the PS3 sectors. Theoretically, you could pop your PS3's drive into a PC, then use
dd with offsets to copy that to another PS3 formatted (and partitioned for Linux) drive.
I wrote something about that here:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7306&p=37944#p37944but - I've never tested it. Proceed with caution.