Now what exactly are the images above all about? To a highly trained eye and someone with a good knack at guessing, the answer is obvious. But for those who don't have a clue, these are actually screenshots of Windows2000 Pro running on the PlayStation 3, both of which have been posted by WickedWanda, over at the official Playstation forums. We're quite a bit baffled ourselves as to how this one was done, so we'll just quote the poster. According to him:

Got Qemu built, installed, and running in YDL and installed Windows 2000 Pro into a virtual machine then installed Wizardry Gold in Windows 2000 Pro. Complete with Soundblaster 16 sound. Used the Gimp in YDL to grab the screens. At any rate another milestone for the PS3!

WickedWanda then went on to explain that this success can be attributed to the intelligence of the PS3 and Microsoft's bloatware. According to him, it all began when he wanted to get access to a full featured web browser in high definition, but one without any of the limitations we currently have (i.e. no Flash support in PPC linux, the inability to play windows media stuff, etc.).

After that, WickedWanda shared that he has been playing Wizadry Gold as well as the DOS-based game Eye of the Beholder in HD.  He needed to play within dosbox with the latter one, though. Lastly, WickedWanda added that he is now attempting to run an N64 emulator on the PS3 by next week.

It's a couple of days late, but we think it can still afford to be labeled important news. Now up for beta testing is the Gentoo PPC64 PS3 LiveCD, which will enable you to use a GNOME desktop environment on both the PS3 and the G5 Apple PowerMac.

If you don't know what GNOME is, it's a kind of open-source desktop environment that people have updated with open source versions of the software normally found in other operating systems. In other words, it's an alternative desktop choice that also has a big, supportive fanbase for newbie questions.

In addition to GNOME, the LiveCD also has Audacious, Evolution, Firefox 2-X (Bon Echo), Gaim, Gimp-2, and Xchat software included, which make it a pretty hefty package. You can find more information on the ins and outs of this new development at the source, and feel free to check the additional link for download mirrors. Just look for the "experimental/ppc64/livecd" directory in your respective mirror sites. Enjoy!

Offsite Link: [Gentoo Download Mirrors]