I always thought that the PlayStation 3 was the only console to offer official Linux support as an alternative operating system, but it turns out I was wrong! Sony had done this before, it just wasn’t in the news because of a major scandal.
That’s right, the mighty PlayStation 2 could run Linux, although getting that to work required quite a bit of effort, and some additional kit.
Sony’s Strange but Brilliant Idea
What if your console wasn’t just a gaming machine, but could also double as a “proper” computer? That’s the idea behind the official Sony Linux kit, which consisted of a Linux distro for the PS2, a USB keyboard and mouse, a VGA adapter, an Ethernet adapter, and a 40GB hard drive. You also needed to have one 8MB memory card you’re willing to format, but that was pretty much the only extra not in the kit.
You can see YouTuberMichael MJDgo through the entire installation process using the official kit below.
It’s quite involved, and the official documentation does say that you need a basic understanding of Linux and its command line to successfully complete the installation. It’s a little weird, actually, considering that this is Linux for a fixed hardware platform. You’d think it could all be automated or preloaded, but either way once you’d successfully managed to complete the installation, you’d have Linux running on your PS2!
What You Could Actually Do With It
It’s important to understand that, when this Linux kit was released around 2002, the PS2 had much lower specs than typical desktop PCs. A PS2 has a specialized 300-ish MHz MIPS CPU and 32MB of RAM.
A typical PC of that era would have somewhere between 128MB and 1GB of RAM, and certainly a CPU that ran in excess of 1GHz. Not to mention that general-purpose x86 CPUs in PCs of the time would be faster at doing some types of operation or would have lots more cache memory. Things that didn’t matter for video games built for the console, but do matter for desktop software.
That said, with a very lightweight desktop environment, there’s no reason you couldn’t do things like browse the web (one page at a time, but it was the style at the time) or do some basic word processing and other typical desktop tasks. I guess if you already had a PS2 and didn’t have a PC, it was a pretty good deal if you just needed a basic computer for homework, or you wanted to learn some coding.
Now, I can’t rightly claim that Sony was the first console maker to come up with the idea to turn a gaming console into a PC. After all, popular microcomputers were essentially console and desktop computer hybrids. The ill-fated Bandai Apple Pippin was basically a console that ran macOS.
So the idea isn’t completely out of left field, but what makes it special is the potential. The PS2 is still the best-selling console in history, so if things had gone a little differently, and the Linux kit was designed to be more user-friendly with proper marketing, there may have been millions of Linux PS2s out in the wild acting as personal computers for people who otherwise might not have had acces to one.
Sony only intended to sell 2,000 Linux kits in Japan, but due to “high” demand it ended upselling 7,900 units. If the company had offered the kit outside of Japan, who knows how many they could have sold?
This Would Never Happen Today
Sony famously offered Linux on the PlayStation 3 to a much wider audience. This time you didn’t need a special kit, you could just insert a compatible Linux disc and run it as a live CD or install Linux on a hard drive partition, since every PS3 comes with internal storage.
You could use your PS3 as a Linux PC, and unlike the PlayStation 2, the PS3’s hardware compared favorably with PCs of the time. In fact, the Cell processor was immensely powerful, it’s just that game developers had a hard time coding for it. However, in 2010, Sony suddenly removed the “OtherOS” functionality from PS3s, and this led to court cases. Most of the legal challenges were dismissed, but Sony did have to settle financially with PS3 owners who used Linux on their consoles.
There are many potential reasons for this. The company had piracy concerns both on PS2 and PS3 when it came to Linux. However, it may also have something to do with certain organizations buying up PS3s and turning them intocheap supercomputer clusters. Since Sony sold these consoles at a loss and needed game sales to make up the difference, that wasn’t a good deal for them.
Today, I can’t imagine Sony suddenly letting us put Linux on a PlayStation 5, but ironically, the next generation of Xbox “consoles” might actually just be Windows PCs. So if Microsoft lets us use those consoles as Windows PCs too, then in a way they’ll pick things up where Sony left off.
