After putting up with more crap than I want to running Fedora Core on the PS3 cluster at work, I decided to try out the new Yellow Dog Linux 6.1 on my PS3 at home. It was a toss up between that and Ubuntu 8.10, and in all honesty I'll probably end up using Ubuntu on my home PS3, but I wanted to at least try YDL since it has supported the PS3 from very early on.

The overall process was pretty simple. I already set up a 10gb Linux partition when I first got my PS3 (I knew it would be inevitable) so I didn't risk losing any of my current data. Just popped in the YDL 6.1 DVD, installed the kboot boot-loader from the DVD, told the PS3 to boot into the "Other OS," and reading the YDL PS3 Install Guide I entered the YDL installation process.

Having spent plenty of time researching with the PS3's limited memory, I knew it was a bad idea to enable any kind of GUI. I disabled all of these services in the installation which made the actual installation only take ~30 minutes.

As you might have noticed, this isn't a step-by-step guide of the installation of YDL 6.1. That can be found in their guide. The rest of the post is getting Wireless with WPA+PSK security working.

First off, I edit the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 file, putting my wireless SSID in the ESSID field and making sure BOOTPROTO was set to DHCP. The rest I left as defaults (which was blank in most of the cases).

Next, edit /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant so that the lines INTERFACES="-iwlan0" and DRIVERS="-Dwext" appear in the file.

Thirdly, edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant and add

network={
        ssid="BensAP"
        scan_ssid=1
        proto=WPA
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        psk="*********"
}

to the end of the file. Obviously, fill in your network's ssid where BensAP is and your key where the stars are.

Fourthly, we need to make sure wpa_supplicant starts on boot up! My understanding is this daemon encrypts/decrypts the data as it gets sent or received over the wlan0 network device, in a very brief nutshell! To enable this service, run chkconfig --levels 345 wpa_supplicant on. This will make sure wpa_supplicant is ran on both the text-only run level (3) and GUI run level (5).

Lastly we need to reorder the boot order, since wpa_supplicant has to be running before we can enable the wireless network device and have it search the network for a DHCP server. I couldn't find a good way to do this with any YDL tools or config files. Although it can be done with a couple rename commands. The first is mv /etc/rc3.d/S10network /etc/rc3.d/S99network and the second is mv /etc/rc5.d/S10network /etc/rc5.d/S99network.

At this point you should be able to reboot and it should work fine! This took me over the span of a few hours and a few different websites ([1] [2] [3]) so I might have missed a small bit. However I feel this post included the information I was missing the majority of the time.

Next up will be Ubuntu, I imagine. However I plan on installing the SDK 3.1 on YDL 6.1 and seeing if it would be any better than Fedora Core for the PS3 cluster.

Stay tuned!