What is Open Source?
This is something that you'll encournter as you use Linux. Open Source is an ideology that programs should be free, not only in binary (compiled executable) form so that people can use it, but the source for it as well so that people can see how it works, why it works, and modify it to fit their needs and share your changes with everyone else. The idea is that this way you can have people from all over the world working together to build an application because they want to. Because of this they're motivated to od a good job so the programmers tend to take more care in their work, produce better code and hence better working programs. Granted this doesn't always work, but that's the idea anyway. More people also provide input so the application can evolve based upon the needs and wants of the users, making the process (again in theory) more dynamic. The downside to all this is that no open source project is ever really finished, so whenever you download something then it's essentially a beta product. You'll find many applications which are very polished, easy to use and better then their closed source counterparts (ie: blender, xine, audacity, firefox, K3B,...). But then again open source devs tend to focus more on getting the functionality done before worrying about usability or appearance (ie: mplayer, DVD Styler,...) or they may not be as feature rich as their commercial counterpart (ie: Open Office). In anycase you can do all the same tasks with open source software as you can with closed source software.
What is closed source?
The other approach to program developement is closed source (ie: commercial). Here the idea is to make software in order to make money from it. You build an application and then sell it to people, and you the customer will never see the source for it. Here you can sometimes find people rushed to meet deadlines, andor working on a project which they don't really care all that much about, this leads to careless coding and possible problems. Design decisions are often based upon corporate needs, rather then what the end user may want (DRM anyone?) and in many cases what you see is what you get... unless you pay for an update to the new version. But then again in most cases when a product is released, then it is polished, stable, easy to get up and running and use. Since what most people care about is how well the end product works, then they won't care if the program has a horrible codebase. Another problem could be if you find a bug or problem of somesorts in a closed source application, then the only thing that you can do is report the problem and hope that the company decides to fix it. If this is an application that the company no longer is supporting, then you're out of luck. With open source you if you have the know how, then you can modify the code and fix the problem yourself (granted most people wouldn't do that... but you could )
So that's a short run down of closed vs open source. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and you can rest assured that neither is going to be going away anytime soon (if ever).
What is Linux?
Linux is an operating system and fullfills the same functions as Windows, Solaris, OSX,... etc. In a nutshell it allows for a convenient way of using, managing and handling the hardware in a computer. Linux differs from the others in one fundamental way, it's open source. As described above this mean that you can access the source, modify anything you want and you have fill control over customizing it. For example with Windows you're stuck with their UI... hell you can't even skin it without hacking it. In Linux you have a vast number of different UIs to choose from... you can just stick to the command line or you can install KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, E17, XFCE,... your choice. A little back history... Linux was started by Linux Torvalds a Finish software engineer, and it's based upon the UNIX operating system (similarly to OSX). In todays days and age there's hundreds of various distrobutions of Linux available, some commercial some not. It's avaialbe for virtually every platform imaginable and it is supported by a lot of big names (ie: IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Dell,...). There are a lot of people working on the various aspects of the system and progress forward can be seen on a regular basis. Though predominantly used in server environments in recent years it has started making it's way to the desktop and it's greadually picking up and expanding (Dell is living proof of this). Because of it's open nature and adaptability it also has a different structure from other operating systems (such as Windows). Another difference because of this is that compared to Windows you also have to at time muck around with the OS and get your hands dirty. Want to install a new piece of hardware to your computer? You may need to recompile your kernel. Hooked up a second monitor? You will have to configure Xorg and and spend a little time editing it's config file. The only possible way of getting around this would be if you started using KDE or Gnome and stayed with it. Those two have lots of various tools built in tools (more so KDE), but chances are that their configuration changes won't carry over to other WMs (KDE to Gnome and vice versa). This is one of the problems with Linux, because of it's open nature and ability to modify anything and everything there's no unification. Every application tends to do it's own little thing making moving from one to the other somewhat painful. Thankfully they've started introducing desktop standards so this should become less of a problem in the future.
What is a distro?
A distro is how you go about installing Linux to your machine. It's a flavour of Linux, all distros built off the same core, but to a different end. This is because of the open nature of Linux. Different people wanted to have an OS focused on a different purpose, so they put together a distribution. For example YDL is focused on building a PPC only flavour of Linux, Ubuntu is trying to make a distribution which is as easy as possible to use, Gentoo wants to be as easily customizable as possible, Suse is designed for the corporate office (and server),... and so on. You also see distros which are based off of other distros. Generally this came about because someone really liked a certain distro, customized it and then wanted to share it with others. For example Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu and Gobuntu are all based off of Ubuntu (if nothing else then the name is a dead give away) and they'll all esentially the same distro (Ubuntu) but setup slightly differently. Ubuntu comes with Gnome preinstalled, Kubuntu and Xubuntu come with KDE and XFCE preinstalled (respectively). Edubuntu is designed to for use in schools and Gobuntu is designed to be pure open source. What does this mean to you the end user? Well, this means that when you pick a distro which best fits your needs and use that as a starting point. You can then modify it and tweak it to your hearts content. If there's something that one distro does, then you can do it in another distro (albiet may not be all that easy). All distros are built using the same building blocks, have the same architecture and all of them are intercompatible (some tweaks may be required).
Linux components
At it's core you'll find the kernel. Every operating system has a kernel. It bridges the gap between the hardware and the software, this is where drivers are stored and where the operating system keeps information about how to access and use the hardware in the system. Contrary to Windows, Linux tries to keep it's kernel as small as possible. Drivers are in the kernel, everything else is a userspace program. See those fancy window managers you have? That's a normal program, it's built ontop of Xorg which is another normal program. In Windows both of these (well, their equivalents) are built directly into the kernel. Other things worth knowing are: Alsa is used for sound, CUPS for printing, crontab for scheduling tasks and udev for device management. With the exception of Alsa all of these are userspace programs (Alsa is built into the kernel). Due to it's flexible nature Linux isn't dependent on any of these components in order to work, they're just there to make your life using the system easier and to allow you to do more with it. I don't really want to go in depth about any specific components here, because you don't really need to know too much about these in order to use linux. If you want more information then just google it, there's going to be tons of information out there.
What can linux do on my PS3? Is it worth it?
Well there's lots of things that Linux can do on your PS3, it essentially turns it into a computer and allows you to do virtually anything that you can do on a computer. Rather then listing off what it can do, I'll just say what it can't do. As of right now the video card in the PS3 is locked off, this means that that you won't have any 3D acceleration. OpenGL won't work properly (if at all), DRI (direct rendering interface) will be unavailable and the more flashy bells and whistles (ie: Xgl/Beryl/Compiz) won't work either. There's only 256 MBs of RAM available (of which only 200MB or so seem to be accessible), this means that you won't be able to do too much multitasking or run any RAM intensive applications. Since this is Linux and not Windows, no Windows applications won't work. Well to be more accurate since this is a PPC system rather then a x86 (ie: Intel/AMD) system, then Wine and Cedega won't work, meaning you won't be able to trick Windows applications into running. The last limitation is that the Cell processor has been optimized for number crunching and Linux hasn't. While this means that Folding at Home works really well, Linux won't be breaking any speed records. Long story shou you'll be able to do anything you can, so long as you fit into the constraints that I just outlined. 2D non-opengl games will work (Battle of Wesnoth and SuperTux 0.1.x work really well), music and video (high def vids may chug), picture viewing and editing, writing/presentations/..etc, and web browsing will work (among other things). I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is a desktop replacement, but it'll work well as a extra PC and given some work I'm hoping that this will work as a HTPC. Is it worth it? Well that's going to be a personal prefference. It is worth it for me and many others, but maybe not for you. If you have no interest in any of the things that it can do, then it's probably not worth it to you. If you don't have the patience or will to learn more about Linux then don't bother installing. But if you've managed to read all the way to here, then I suspect that you've already made up your mind as to whether or not to give it a shot. In the end you don't really have anything to lose. Linux is free and it won't take more then a few hours to get up and running. Just backup your stuff from your PS3 (you will lose everything when you format to allocate space to Linux) and off you go.
Hit the link for more.
http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=ps3media&thread.id=55798
