Nope, this was an official, legally sold product. Came with a keyboard, mouse, 40gb HDD, and PS2 ethernet adapter. Required an 8MB memory card to function and installed via command line. It’s a pretty cool piece of history.
The operating systems from the PS3, PS4, PS5, 3DS and Switch and Mac OS are based on FreeBSD. The Wii U probably also runs something based on FreeBSD.
Linux for the PS2 is based on Red Hat.
Chrome OS is based on Gentoo
IIRC Sony allowed Linux to be ran on both the PS2 and PS3 so that they could sell the systems as computers in the US instead of video game consoles, since computers have a lower import tax rate compared fo video game systems.
This was, of course, until Sony removed OtherOS support in the PS3 firmware 3.21 on phat models after shipping Slim units without OtherOS and then got sued for it. It was removed because George Hotz found an exploit in OtherOS that allowed for full access to the hardware, as OtherOS did not have full access to the GPU hardware of the PS3. Ironically, this made the PS3 more of a target to hackers, since hackers generally just want to be able to run homebrew on their devices that they bought. This is why the Xbox One and Series consoles were never hacked, since they allow for homebrew via DevMode.
The tax loophole was a perceived reason, but it was never proven to be true. The closest admission to it was Sony losing a lawsuit related to the situation and Sony admitting that something related to Yabasic was intended to skirt EU tax law, not Linux for PS2. I never heard of Yabasic before today.
Fun fact, Geohot owns a company that jailbreaks cars and their adaptive cruise control systems now.
I like this post and find it generally helpful however feel the last line about why Xbox One hasn’t been emulated yet is in my opinion both opinion and speculation, which is fine –
I think the community could come up with some robust counter arguments about why this hasnt occured yet, maybe there not being interest due to catalog overlap between Xbox and Windows PC since the OS is basically a custom Windows with a custom Direct X, as is the case for Xbox Y2K, and Xbox 360 and has been put into a virtual machine AFAIK via Xemu and Xenia. Following that legacy, Xbox fans have always seemed slower than other fans to emulate their consoles – for whatever reason.
Yeah. They cancelled it after they realized that people were buying consoles to build computing structures which went against Sony’s “sell the console at a loss and make it up in game sales” strategy.
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