Every now and then I'm pleasantly surprised by features of the PS3 that aren't
apparent at first glance. Here are some of them.
The PS3 is equipped with wireless network connectivity. If you have media library on your PC and are tired of transfering files via USB stick, a nice solution is to set up a media server. This will allow you to stream files, and access all of your media files remotely from the PS3.
A media server that is working well for me is TVersity. It's free for non-commercial use, and was easy to install. The PS3 was able to pick up the server without any additional configuration.
Aside from the obvious benefits of being able to access your PC files directly, a fantastic bonus feature is that TVersity is able to transcode video files on the fly. This provides a great work-around for the very annoying video file format limitations of the PS3 GameOS (currently, only AVI and a few other file formats are supported, which previously made it hard to watch those MKV-encoded fansubs :-) Beware though that transcoding will put some load on your PC, and if your network connection is not very good, you may get a drop in framerate.
Sony officially supports the use of alternative OS-es on the PS3, giving options from within the default GameOS to partition the hard-drive for multiple-OS use.
Various flavours of Linux now include out-of-the-box PS3 support, including Yellow Dog Linux. Installation was relatively straightforward (at least, no more fiddly than installing Linux on a PC :-)
So, plug in your USB keyboard and mouse, and off you go with your PS3 as a full-fledged computer. But just before you throw out your PC, there are a few issues. Despite the official support for other OS-es, the installation process is not a true dual-boot setup. The GameOS still sits underneath Linux, and provides an interface between Linux and the PS3 hardware. This presents one large limitation, in that the PS3 doesn't seem to make very much RAM available. As a result, your Linux applications are likely to spend a lot of time grinding away on the hard-disk. Hopefully a solution to this issue will be available soon. In the interim, some people have suggested using a USB stick as extra swap space for Linux.
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