If you read the paper version of Popular Mechanics, you may have already seen this. But on the internet, if you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you — as we are constantly reminded by recycled pictures of women in tubs. And this is more worth a look than that. Pop Mech has published a pretty straightforward how-to on getting Ubuntu to run on your big scary PS3. I don’t think there’s any risk of bricking your console, but losing game data is definitely an option so only do this if you’re sure about it.
It actually looks quite easy, and once you install a nice big 250GB hard drive in it, it might be pretty sweet to be able to boot the thing up into an all-purpose media player unencumbered by Sony’s UI. You can also enter a drawing to win the thing, which I have done, because I really want it.