Hello, everybody, and welcome
back to another video now in today's episode, we're going to be trying
to install Linux on the PlayStation 2. Using none other than Sony's
official Linux kit. That's right. This right here was an official offering
from Sony, released back in 2002. That allowed you to turn your PlayStation
2into a fully functional desktop computer. Now, I've been wanting to make this video
for a while, and I started looking a while back for a copy of this official
CD set right here over on eBay. But I quickly found out that people are charging top dollar
for this product right here. I found listings that went as high as $300. But then I got the idea to check
the Japanese auction websites. And sure enough, I was able to find
this copy right here in a listing that was going for a third
of the price- around $100. And believe it or not,
it included an entire Japanese PlayStation 2. That's right, I was blown away
when I actually found this listing. Because this is going to really come in handy. Because just like all other PlayStation 2 discs, this copy of Linux right here is region locked, and it can only be installed
on a Japanese PlayStation 2. As you can see up here it is NTSC-J. So it ain't gonna work on a North
American or European PS2 unless, of course, you bypass region locking,
which I was originally going to do. But unfortunately, the North
American model that I have essentially requires you
to install a mod chip. And that's something
we could certainly do. But hey, this is going to be much easier. And yes, by the way, I am including the shipping charge
even after paying the shipping fee. This was still cheaper than
buying that $300 listing on eBay. But it was still, you know, a bit expensive. And that's why I want to thank
today's video sponsor, Linode, for helping me purchase this
and making this video possible. I'll be talking more about them later
on, but before we do that, let's talk more about what you would get
with this PlayStation 2 Linux kit. Because Sony essentially
included everything you need to use your PlayStation
2 as a desktop computer. Aside from a monitor. First up, you got a PlayStation
2 branded USB keyboard. Very, very nice. You can see this is a Japanese keyboard because it actually went along
with this PlayStation 2 right here. You also got a PlayStation
two branded ball mouse. Very, very cool. You also got a VGA cable
that could be plugged into the AV out port on the back of the PlayStation 2. And a hard drive. Which, you know, certainly
going to need one of those, right? But you also had to provide
a couple of things yourself. You had to provide a monitor, obviously, and an 8 MB PlayStation 2 memory card. But chances are, you probably had one of these already. Now I do want to mention one
other very important thing before we get started, and
that is one of the major differences between this Japanese PlayStation 2
and my North American model right here. And that is the presence
of the PlayStation 2 expansion bay. The PlayStation 2 expansion bay
was an extremely useful component for the PlayStation 2
that allowed you to install a 3.5 inch IDE hard drive. This is a SATA drive right here. Just imagine it's IDE. And you could use this hard drive
with a handful of PlayStation 2 games that supported it for
storing data and things like that. And you needed to have the
PlayStation 2 Network Adapter, which had the necessary ports on the
back to connect to the hard drive. And then it would plug right into this port up here. And it would sit nicely on the back. It would protrude a little bit, but that's how you would actually set
this thing up and get it working. And if you would purchase the
PlayStation 2 Linux kit here in the U.S., this is what you would get. You would get a 3.5 inch internal hard drive
and the PlayStation 2 Network Adapter. But the expansion bay was not present
on the original PlayStation 2 models. The models that were only released in Japan. Now, this is pretty typical
for Japanese companies. When they release a product or a game,
it usually gets released in Japan first, and then it makes its way to
the rest of the world after that. There are certain exceptions, certainly,
but in most cases that's the way it is. So by the time the PlayStation 2
was released here in North America, the expansion bay was a standard feature. But that wasn't the case
with these initial versions here. And as an American, I didn't know this. But I was very surprised when I got this in the mail to see on the back instead of the expansion bay... a PCMCIA card slot. That's right. And inside of here... We have the early PlayStation 2 Network adapter, which takes the form of a PCMCIA card. So this is what you would get
in the PlayStation 2 Linux kit if you purchased the earliest
revision of it in Japan. Now you might be saying "Ok, well how on earth do you
install a hard drive in this thing?" There's no slot for it, right? The answer is you don't. Instead, what you got was this really
cool looking external hard drive. You would plug this external cable
right here into the network adapter. So just like the later PlayStation 2 models, the hard drive here also requires the
network adapter to function properly. The later revisions were much
nicer because, you know, it was much more compact. The hard drive was contained inside. It got power from the unit itself. You did not have to carry
around this external power brick to plug into the back of the hard drive.
and it was also easily user replaceable. And it was also easily user replaceable. This external hard drive right
here, though it looks cool, you got right here a "warranty
void if removed" sticker. So if you wanted to replace
your hard drive in here if it died... You were going to void your warranty. We're going to be using this
today to install our copy of Linux for the PlayStation2 release 1.0. Let's see how simple it really is. All right, so we're just about ready to go here. I have not tested the hard drive. I have confirmed that the PlayStation 2 works. So we're going to test the
hard drive here in a moment. and we're also going to test this very interesting cable here. This right here, you can see is a VGA cable we can plug this into the monitor
and then these other three run to your standard composite connectors here. So, yeah, there you go. So this is how you could
connect it to a TV if you wanted to. You can see, though, this white
composite connector in particular has definitely seen better days, but let's see if this cable actually works. So we're going to turn it back
here, and we're going to plug it into the AV out here. And then let's plug this
into the monitor here. We'll turn it on. And we got nothing! We really should not be seeing
the test pattern here. So that's not- Oh wait! Oh, it's flickering. Is the connector just bad? Perhaps the connection is bad. But you know what connection isn't bad? Your connection to one of today's video
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for supporting the channel. All right, everybody. Here we go. We've got the PlayStation 2 hooked up
and we're going to get started with this. So right here- and we've got our copy of Linux and there are two CDs,
or DVDs rather in here. one of them is the runtime environment,
and the other one says software packages. So we're just going to start with disc 1. The disc drive is a bit finicky. The motor is definitely going bad. This is what I've not- From here on out, I've not tested anything else. I've not tested if the hard drive works. I've not gone through this installation process, so I'm experiencing this
for the first time with you guys. And there it goes. It just automatically started
to boot up from the disc. Now the hard drive is really
interesting to me because- We got no signal temporarily here. Does it only output over VGA? You know, I think the reason why
the VGA signal wasn't working before is because it's not outputting a VGA signal when it's on the PS2 menu. And yet, right here, I have a feeling that it's outputting a VGA signal. So that makes sense... why this cable here is the way that it is and why it has both composite and VGA. All right. Yeah, it turns out I was right. So right now it's only
outputting a VGA signal. So we are going to- I assume the keyboard is- yep. So now we're we're controlling
it with the keyboard here. So we're just going to install it here. "The HDD, the memory card (PS2) and a USB keyboard are need for installation, make sure they
are properly installed in the console." Ok, so now we've got to
insert disc 2 to load data. Ok, so we'll eject this
take out disc number 1. So let's grab disk number 2 here,
which is the software packages DVD. Oh, there we go. Loading. Perfect. All right. Oh, now we gotta- We have to put disc 1 back in. All right. Mildly interesting. So we'll put in disc number 1 I almost said diskette number one. I've been living in the '90s
for the past couple of videos. All right, disc number 1 is back in. Now what I'm really interested in figuring out is how this hard drive works
because there aren't any buttons or switches on it at all to power it on. And ok, it faded to a green screen there. And oh, there we go. The hard drive just came on. So we have to choose a language. The screen is a bit finicky here. It's really jittering, and I honestly
think that's because of the connection. I don't think this cable is the greatest. I think that definitely
this is caused by that cable since I've just reset all settings on the
monitor and it's doing the same thing. Let me just check and make
sure it's seated properly. All right. So good news. I got it to where it's not jittering anymore. But you can see it is considerably green. Let's see if we can go to color
settings and let's lower the green. Maybe a little bit. All right. So we're good, at least for now. So let's go ahead with English.
That's wonderful. What type of keyboard do you have? Well, we do have a Japanese keyboard, but it is a standard QWERTY keyboard just with Japanese characters
printed on the bottom right of the keys. So we could just go with
let's just go with the U.S. keyboard layout. Ok, we have to put it back in disc 2, ok. But yeah, so the hard drive
just automatically comes on when the system needs it, too. So that's nice. I's not going to be constantly on when you're playing a game,
for example, that doesn't use it. "Welcome to PS2 Linux" or "elcome" because it's slightly cut off there. And there we go. "Welcome to PS2 Liunx" This installation process is outlined in detail in the PS2 Linux Software Manual. So you got 3 options here: WindowMaker Workstation Server System and Custom System. We're going to go with WindowMaker Workstation. Let's go ahead and use Disk Druid All right, so it looks like we've
got four partitions on here, so we're just going to start from scratch. We're going to delete all these partitions here. So we'll tab down to our
options here at the bottom. We're going to delete... And we're going to delete hda1, delete hda2 three and four And then we're going to add- Now we have to make a
native and a swap partition. You see, those are the 2
options there on the side. So we'll do the swap partition first. We'll just leave the mount point blank. We'll make the size 128 megabytes. We'll make this the swap partition. And there we go. And then we'll add another partition. We will make this- This will be the native partition,
so we'll do mount point of "/" And what we can do is just leave it at- just leave it at the default size there
and then just do this "grow to fill HDD." So the rest of the hard drive
will be taken up by this partition. This will be Linux native. And there we go! All right. So we hit "ok" to save changes
to the partition table. Yes. "What partitions would you like to format?" "We strongly suggest formatting
all the system partitions." Ok, now checking for bad blocks. Honestly, we probably
should check for bad blocks. Because I have no idea what
condition that this hard drive is in. All right, hostname of the console. We'll call this "LinuxStation" Oooo, really original name, right? And yeah, we're not going to bother with the network configuration will just leave
this as the default setting here. So it's going to ask us what
time zone were located in. We'll just select Japan here. Does Japan only have one time zone? I thought they had more than one. "Pick a root password." Ok, we'll do this as "mjd" we'll make this ultra secure, right? Oh, "must be 6 characters long." Ok, "mjdmjd" "mjdmjd" There we go. And so now it's going to prompt us
to create a user account that is not root and we are getting some drive activity. "We'll need to turn on swap space immediately to do this, we'll have to write a new
partition table to the HDD immediately if answer yes here, you cannot go
back to previous steps anymore. is that okay?" Yes, that's fine. So now it's going to, I assume
format the drive there. Yep, there you go. "Formatting swap partition
with badblocks checking." "It takes several minutes to
complete depending on partition size. press CTRL+ALT+F5 to look what's going on." And what's going on? Looks like a whole lot of nothing. At least, we can't see anything. So we can go back to the screen here. All right, we're getting some drive activity now. Let me swap back over. There we go. So, yeah, honestly, I mean,
pretty straightforward. I mean, obviously, you have to know
what all these options mean. I think partitioning the
drive would be something that'll be quite difficult for someone
who has certainly never used Linux before. And that's why on Sony's website,
where they talk about this, they specifically say, like you should know, at least
a little bit about Linux and how to set up a Linux installation
from scratch before you actually buy this. All right, so we're at the
formatting screen again. Let's do CTRL+ALT+F5. All right. Yeah, "checking for bad blocks (read-only test)" But yeah, so far, so good. All right, so it's just about done. Checking for bad blocks definitely took
a considerable amount of time. Ok, so now we're at the
package installation screen. So now it's going to start copying
everything over to the hard drive. Perfect. I mean, so far guys,
things are looking really good. (the signature MJD timelapse music) All right. Good news, it was able to copy
everything over to the hard drive without any problems, and
now it's asking us to insert a memory card with no data
in the memory card slot one. So we already have that in here.
So we're just going to hit enter. "Congratulations, installation is complete." Press the enter key to
finish the installation, then insert the disc 1
and restart the console. There we go. We just loaded off of the disc. So we're going to go over to- Let's see if you can navigate on this screen with the controller. Yes, you can. Ok, so we're going to boot. "Linux on memory card (PS2)" Ok And there goes the hard drive. Looking good guys, looking really good. "Welcome to PS2 Linux." All right. "LinuxStation login." So my username was "michael" And my password was "mjdmjd" So we're going to type in
"startx" to load into the GUI. And what's really cool about
this is the UI it has included- Ummm... It's way off of the screen here. We're going to have to change that. All right, good news. I was able to configure the monitor properly. Again, the colors are going to be an issue. But I've adjusted them to the best of my ability. To make it so it's not as eye straining to look at. But what I was saying earlier, you're probably thinking "Oh, is this like NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?" Like what on earth- This looks exactly like OPENSTEP, right? Well, it's actually called WindowMaker. And WindowMaker, as it says, is
apart of the GNUstep project. So this is a component of GNUstep. Which was essentially an initiative to try and create an
implementation of OPENSTEP but it was completely free and
available for anybody to use. And so that's what we are running here,
and I think it's pretty cool just on that alone that it chooses to use WindowMaker
as its graphical environment here. So if you've used NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP
before you'll feel right at home. So we can go through here and one
of the things we can do is launch- I believe this right here is the
WindowMaker preferences. And so this is where you can
customize all sorts of components. You can change how certain things look. You can change how the UI behaves. You know, pretty useful. You would definitely want to go in here if you were planning on using this
as a primary or secondary machine. I mean, you probably wouldn't use a
PlayStation 2 as your primary computer. But I mean, hey, perhaps
someone out there did. Who had nothing else. And was able to get their hands on this kit. So you'd really want to spend time in
here customizing this to your liking. But honestly, it's been a while since
I've used NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. I don't own any NeXT hardware. I am constantly on the
lookout for NeXT hardware. But you know it is pretty rare to come by. But if I ever find a NeXTcube or
a NeXTstation out in the wild, you bet I'm going to buy it
if it's for a really good price. If we right click here, we get
our little applications menu. We can go to info, and let's
open up the info panel. So this gives you more information about the version
of GNU WindowMaker that this is. This is version 0.61.1. And of course, we have GIMP on here. I find this kind of funny. It's the only program here under
graphics, so let's launch GIMP here. Let's see what version this is first of all, let's see. So "1995-2000" "Program is free software" And ok, personal GIMP directory. Oh, it's actually installing it.
Ok, so it hasn't even been installed yet. Ok, so we'll let it create
our personal GIMP directory. And there it is, "The GIMP", it says. Check out this old logo
here, and the old type. Oh my gosh, that is beautiful. Oh, this is a prerelease! Wow, this just got super interesting. So let's see what GIMP looked like
back in prerelease version 1.2. "Welcome to the GIMP!" "Nearly all image operations
are performed by right clicking on the image, and don't worry,
you can undo most mistakes..." Wonderful.
That is our tip of the day here. Yeah, you got all your windows here,
all your different components. You got your tools over here. Tool options, brush selection. So let's go ahead and make
a new document here. This is absolutely the thing you want
to do when you spend all this time installing Linux on a PS2 is open
up GIMP and just mess around with what GIMP has to offer. So let's see here. Gosh, it's been a while since I've used GIMP. Yes, I'm a Photoshop user. So, you know, I mean, I know how GIMP works and everything, but it's definitely been
a while since I've used it So we'll expand this here a little bit. And let's say we want to start
with a beautiful text layer. Oh man, check out all these fonts on here. Oh, beautiful. Let's go with- Let's go with "open look cursor." "The selected font is not available." Oh, ok, so what fonts are available then? Let's go with clean. You know, we're gonna keep it clean on this channel, right? Let's bump that up to size 16 and
we're going to make this bold. And... yeah, you know, I think that's looking good. So it wasn't able to find a font apparently. Ok, so maybe we can't use that font. All right. Let's just try.... Oh, Lord, ok, this is
going real well, isn't it? "dingbats" Oh, "selected font is not available." Well then, why is it in the list? Let's go with this one, maybe. Well, I don't see any text, do you? Oh, there it goes. Ok, it just took a little while
to process there. That's all good. And apparently I've moved
the entire document like off the screen. All right. You know what?
We're just going to leave it there. And ok, apparently I made
two text layers there And let's make a new layer. Those are both on the... the background layer, actually,
that did not make a new layer. So we're going to make- Oh no, I don't want to make
a copy of the background layer. I wanted to make a new layer. And on this new layer,
what are we going to do? We are going to get the brush tool. Which is not that... And let's make this a
wonderful really light blue. And we're just going to say... Look at how wonderful that looks. It is having trouble keeping up with me here. I want to drag... like... down. To make a "j".
Yeah, ok. We'll just leave it like that. "mjd" Oh, that's so good. Ok, we're going to
save this masterpiece. Dude, if that's not an NFT that I can sell
for $20 million, I don't know what is. Oh my gosh, I'm totally putting this- No, just kidding. Oh, I did- whoops! I did not want to do that. All right, so we got "new" and "open". But we do not have a "save". Let me just do CTRL+S maybe... There we go. Ok. I was not able to find- It's probably like, you know, somewhere. But anyways, we'll save this to... Let's just do it in the home directory. That's fine. And we'll just call this "NFT" Save- Oh, "unknown file type" Yeah, we have to add an extension here. Let's save this as a PNG. "Image should be exported", ok. And that looks good to me. There we go. There's our wonderful NFT.png. And so now we can open that up if we want to. But yeah, one thing I am going to do
is move GIMP over here to the dock. But yeah, the dock here behaves just like
you know it in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. We can drag it off the screen
and temporarily hide it. So let's see what else was going on here. We have KTerm for the terminal,
if we want to open this up. We can pin that over here. Oh yeah, and there's themes too. That's in the right click menu here. I did want to point these out. So you go to appearance here. You got themes and you got styles. So we can change this
to, let's say, OPENSTEP. And you see, that'll completely
change the theme here. It'll change the look of the windows a little bit. So we can go ahead and open up... Let's let's open up GIMP again. So we have something running
while we're going through here. We have this window open, let's go back here. Let's go to appearance. Let's change that to "STEP2000." And so there is how that looks. Yeah, some of these themes are pretty cool. So let's set that to... "Checker" maybe. Oh, that's super nice. Oh my gosh, that is wonderful. Oh, that's great. Ok, now let's go to styles here. Oh, that's just, ok. That's the style. So the themes incorporate a style. So you got more... Yeah. So the themes are going to be
pretty much just like in Windows, you know how you got themes
and you got visual styles and the themes will incorporate a visual style,
but it will also change other things. So you got that here. You can change the style individually, The Icon Set- you don't have any other options. The background. Oh, can we make the background... I want to figure out how
to make the background my beautiful image that I just made. And by the way, for those who
don't know how this works. So when you right click on the desktop
anywhere, it brings up this menu and then when you right click
when you're off of it, it goes away. But you can make it a permanent window
by just clicking on the title bar here. And you see it as this "X" here
and now you can move it around. And if you right click over here,
you can see it will open up another one. So that's very useful if you want to have this permanently-
which honestly, we should. Let's go and just leave it there. Icon background. Honestly, if we can make the icon background- Can you actually add an image in here? Image texture? Oh my gosh, don't tell me
this is actually going to work. It was under GNUstep. Yep, there it is. Oh my gosh, this is actually going to work. Oh no. There we go. That's what I was looking for. So we literally have our stupid image. Oh my gosh, that is the most
beautiful thing I've ever seen. OK, what else can we can we screw up here? Menu items? How on- How would this work- Oh yeah, there we go. It's going to be on the menu items. Oh my god, this is going to be so terrible. Ok, let's go to- Oh yeah, title bar. Oh, let's make
this the title bar of menus It just applied over there. Ok, window resize bar. We're just going through all of these here. This is how WindowMaker
and NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP was designed to be used. Putting this awful graphic to literally cover everything. Ok, honestly guys, I think that I'm pretty happy with this. I'm immensely satisfied with- with what we've done here,
this is just so hilariously awful and yeah guys, that I guess is going to wrap it up for today's video here. That is installing Linux on the PlayStation 2 using Sony's official Linux kit. I really hope you guys
enjoyed this video, if you did, be sure to give it a thumbs up, be sure to get subscribed down below. All that good stuff. And as always, I want to thank you all so much for watching,
and I will see you in the next video. (outro music)
