Linux on Playstation 3 looks good...

[Jupp3]

they care enough to make psp homebrew damn near impossible, f.e. changing firmware every couple of months.

And how exactly does "changing firmware every couple of months" make "homebrew damn near impossible", if I may ask? Those updates aren't installed automatically or anything.

Only problem there used to be was that every new unit had "newest at the time of manufacture" firmware pre-installed (for a while the "homebrew maximum" was 2.0, being the highest version capable of running rather limited homebrew and -more importantly- being downgradeable to v1.5 which is kind of "unofficial standard homebrew version")

Nowadays you can downgrade from much newer versions than 2.0.

What you might say next is "new games require new firmware", which is (kind of) true.

"In the old days" people were hacking iso images of games, replacing files from older 1.5-compatible games. That way you could get an iso image of a game running on 1.5 from memory stick. Nowadays there's this wonderful "anti-piracy tool" called "Dev-hook" that can run newer (upto 2.71, which indeed is "quite new". Additionally many "if version
I recently bought Guilty Gear XX & Judgement from the US (games aren't region coded) and it "requires" 2.71, yet runs just fine on dev-hook. Of course I wouldn't have bought it if it would not work :-)

Of course Sony is trying to prevent new games running on not-really-"upgraded" PSP's (and homebrew-users from buying the said games) but they have been failing in doing that for a long time. Already 1.5 was supposed to be "homebrew-proof", but it most definitely isn't.

It's not that they're not trying to prevent homebrew being ran on PSP, it's that they're totally failing in trying to do that.

[Jupp3]

they care enough to make psp homebrew damn near impossible, f.e. changing firmware every couple of months.

Sorry for keeping on a bit off-topic, but it's generally about Sony, and same kind of things might happen with PS3 aswell :-)

So Sony recently released firmware update 3.0 (and 3.01 the next day, that's just a security upgrade though)

Anyway, straight to the point... It already runs fine on dev-hook (a program that can run firmware updates from memory card without doing the actual update, thus keeping the device fully homebrew capable... Obviously devhook itself is also homebrew :-))

Earlier if you wanted to run homebrew, that's fine. Just don't install the updates (and not use software that requires it)

Since devhook you have access to >95% of games that do require the update (and other stuff, like the web browser aswell)

Obviously Sony will keep on doing new firmware versions trying to make them "homebrew-proof" but they've been trying to do that since the very beginning, and still failed with the latest update.

And taking the worst case scenaro that they eventually will manage to do homebrew-proof firmware and games that will really require the update (You know, the day I and many others will stop buying PSP games) it will still take a long time to:
1)Do such a firmware update (they've tried for over year, and always failed)
2)Manufacture new game discs, that contain the newest update

Thanks to the new devhook update, I now have confidence to order Metal Slug Anthology (the bestest PSP release EVER! to be released soon) - earlier I thought it might be safer to wait for someone elses confirmation that it works.

In the end I could ask again that how exactly Sony is making it nearly impossible to run homebrew on psp? :-)

[Jupp3]

I mean sombody tell me why would it be better to run MOS on ps3 over nice x86 hardware?

In addition to the mentioned driver issue, one obvious reason is that it's PowerPC based. I know that this might sound a bit weird, but porting an operating system (and significant amount of programs, or do a fast and compatible enough emulator) to a totally different CPU architecture is not really as easy as it might sound. Or if it is, why don't you do something like that yourself? :-)

No, I'm not saying why OS should be ported to PS3, rather answering the all too common question "Why PPC instead of X86"

When it comes to PS3, it's probably better to "wait and see" - we MIGHT get (f.ex.) 3D support, or we might not. Currently it's too restricted environment to be useful for many things. But knowing Sony, it might well stay like that (or rather become even more restricted) BUT knowing what's happened with PSP, it might well be possible to "hack our way" into things that most people nowadays take for granted, such as 3D acceleration.

And in any case, it's not our choice really which hardware platforms certain operating systems run on.