I spent around 5 hours over the weekend installing Fedora Core 5 Linux on my PlayStation 3.

After getting myself a 120gb Fujitsu HDD from OverClockers.co.uk, I made a 10Gb partition for the ‘second OS’, and set about the installation process. It would’ve been quicker if I hadn’t downloaded the wrong 3.4Gb file first, oops. But once I had the v5 torrent it took 2 hours to download and about 2 and a half hours to install.

For a free operating system, it’s great. Looks a bit too bit on my 42” Sharp 1080p LCD but still. Fedora Core 5 and the PlayStation 3 add on disk that it comes with give you a desktop operating system that has everything you need out of the box, including: full Open Office applications, A few web browsers including FireFox 1.5 (upgradeable to 2.0), Mail clients, IRC clients, Graphics applications, Photo Applications, DVD/CD players plus a multitude of server and database applications and a whole load more. Basically, everything you’d need.

I mostly installed it out of curiosity but now curiosity is driving me to investigate upgrading to Fedora Core 6 and installing Beryl. Which is very pretty indeed.

Update: Ok. So I upgraded to Fedora Core 6 before learning that Beryl won’t run on it. Doh. That was a waste of time…