This guide will tell you about Installing PS4 Linux to the Internal Hard Drive.
Requirements
1- First, you need to have a breakable jail PS4, that’s on firmware 9.00.
2- You also need to load the gold hand payload by going onto your internet browser and then going to your favorite exploit host. You can go to es7in1.site which has a bunch of different exploit horses that you can pick in case one of them is down.
3- Use kme ps4.site, go to kme ps4.site or go to es7in1.site and select one of the exploit hosts. Then load the Gold hen payload from here and plug in the USB drive with the hat image on it to jailbreak the system and get the gold 10 payload running.
3- Once you have gold hen running if you’re installing Linux to the internal hard drive then enable the FTP server in Gold hen by going to the gold 10 options and navigating to server settings. Enable the FTP server and a notification shows your IP address on the port number to connect to FTP. Now your FTP server will start running.
4- Now, go to the settings option and then scroll down to system and system information. You can see it shows the South Bridge and if this doesn’t show up, it’s because you either don’t have gold hen running or the version of gold 10 you’re running is too old. So use one of the newer gold 10 versions like 2.3 or higher.
5- After that, switch to your PC and download the kernel file for the type of Southbridge that you have. For this, click on the following link https://github.com/Hakkuraifu/PS4Linux-Documentation#kernel. There is areola, Belize, and Belize 2, and also bakal, which you can download according to your Southbridge.
6- Now click on the following link https://www.psxita.it/psxitarch-v3/ to download the distro that you want to use. The Best distro is PSX Arch distro because it’s kind of the most up-to-date distro that has a lot of cool features built-in.
7- Once you reach the site, scroll download until you find the PSXitarch.tar.gz and click on the Download button.
8- There are also other distros, so click on the following link https://ps4linux.com/downloads/ as this website has a catalog of a lot of distros that you can download. Login and there will be PSXitArch V3, Steam OSz, Fedora-based distros Ubuntu-based distros, so you can download anyone you want to use.
PC Settings
1- Once you’ve got your distro downloaded, the next thing you need to do is download the interim file. For this, click on the following link https://www.mediafire.com/file/wziaiuqttxlwwgp/initramfs.zip/file
2- Now open the downloaded folder and you will find different interim FS for the internal hard drive and the external hard drive. So if you’re booting Linux from an external storage device like a USB or external hard drive, you need to use the external HDD folder and if you are booting from the internal hard drive, then use the Internal HDD Folder.
3- Now, open up FileZilla and then connect it to your PS4 by typing the PS4’s IP address in the host box. Then the port number is 2121 and click on Quick connect to your PS4’s hard drive, so it is for installing to the internal hard drive.
4- Go into the user folder and create a new folder in the system folder with a new directory. Right-click, create a new directory, and name this directory boot.
5- Once the boot folder is created, copy all of your files, take your distro PSX itarch.tar.gz or whatever distro you’ve downloaded and copy it. Then take your bz image file and copy that in and your interim FS as well for the internal HDD.
6- After copying all the files into the boot folder, if you’ve copied any other distro besides PSX itArch, then rename it to the same name. So rename it to PSXitarch.tar.xz or gz
7- In case you are going to boot Linux from the external hard drive or a USB stick, then connect that USB stick up to your computer and copy those same files into the root of the USB stick or external hard drive. Make sure that the external hard drive or USB is formatted in FAT32 format
8- It must be using the MBR partition style you can use a program like Rufus to format the drive in FAT32 format with the MBR partition. Open the Rufus software and set the device to your USB drive or to your hard drive. Set the Partition scheme to MBR. Under the Format, options set the label to USB and the File size should be set to large FAT-32, then click on the Start button.
Console Settings
1- If you’re booting Linux from the internal hard drive, then you must check how much storage space you have available. For this, go into storage, and you will find the available storage. Linux requires around 20 GB of free storage. If you have that much storage available, then you are good to go.
2- Now, go back into settings and scroll down to sound and screen. From here, change your video output settings. First, change the resolution and set it to something lower than 4K 1080p it might work on 720p as well but the recommendation is that it must not be 4K. If it’s 4K, then you will not regain a signal when you boot into Linux so set it to 1080p.
3- Set the RGB range to full and make sure that HDR is off. Set the deep color output to OFF.
3- After that, go back to the system and make sure that the “Enable HDMI device link” is disabled. You also need to disable HDCP. If you have a PS4 Pro, then enable boost mode as it will give you a bit more performance.
Linux Installation
4- Open the Internet Browser on your PS, and then return to your exploit host. Go to your Linux vram payloads and load the one-gigabyte vram payload, so if you’re on a PS4 Pro, then run the one that says Dash Pro because it gives you better performance on PS4 pros.
5- If you’re on a base PS4 or a slim PS4, you’re going to select the one-gigabyte vram payload you can either use the PSXit Linux one gigabyte or the Nazky YT Linux one gigabyte whichever one works best for you.
6- Once you are successfully booted into the shell, you’ll lose the signal for a few seconds, and then you should regain the signal. You’ll notice that the PS4 itself is emitting a blue LED and kind of flashing purple light every couple of seconds which means you are booted into Linux successfully.
7- If you don’t have a signal, then there’s something going on, there like perhaps your settings weren’t set correctly with 1080P and disabling HDR and all of that stuff and HDCP being disabled. So double-check all of those settings.
8- Also make sure that you don’t have any USB devices connected to the PS4 while you’re booting into Linux. Also, don’t have the charging cable connected to your controller and you don’t have any keyboard or mouse or anything connected when you’re initially booting into Linux.
9- Once you actually get into the shell and plug in a USB keyboard to start typing, another thing that can happen is the PS4 can switch off when you try to boot into the Linux loader. In this case, you might have to either try a different Linux loader payload or try a different bz image file because that can often be the cause.
10- If you plug in a keyboard, once you’re actually into the shell and you try to start typing something in, it just immediately crashes, or as soon as you plug the keyboard in, it just locks up. This can also be a sign that the bz image file that you’re using is not compatible with your PS4 model and you’ll have to try another one.
11- After fixing all these errors, once you are in the shell, you can then plug in a USB keyboard. Type in the following command if you’re installing to an external hard drive or USB stick the command:
exec install-PSXitarch.sh
12- It will start installing the distro. If you’re installing to the internal hard drive of the PS4, then use this command:
install-Linux-HDD.sh13- After entering the command, press the enter key and you will get a prompt that says Enter the amount of storage to dedicate to your Linux install. So that’s why you checked how much storage you had available before you booted into Linux. You can give 20GB to this.
14- It will set everything up in this part, and you can take a while depending on how much space you’ve dedicated to your Linux installed the more space the longer it will take, but once it’s done it will then start extracting the distro into the space that is set up.
Distro Settings
15- Once the Installation completes then it will either boot you directly into the distro, or it will prompt you to enter some more commands into the shell.
16- After successfully installing it, you need to type in resume-boot if it doesn’t boot you into the distro automatically which it might do, and then press Enter if it didn’t work so type it in again because it does say do it a few times resume.
17- Once you are in Distro, a black screen will appear which lost signal for a few seconds. If it happens, then you need to refresh the HDMI signal to your PS4, which you can do by switching inputs on your monitor or unplugging the HDMI and plugging it back in.
18- Once you’ve refreshed the HDMI signal, press Ctrl+alt F2 and then F1, it will refresh and boot you successfully into the distro.
19- Now, you can connect a USB mouse, or you can actually use the PS 4 controller’s touchpad as a mouse. So you can plug in the charging cable for your controller and use that as a mouse.
You can access your Wi-Fi if you’re on Wi-Fi you can access the Wi-Fi networks from here. Only if the drivers are working on your PS4, otherwise you can connect via a LAN cable.
20- First, customize the little menu on the top left corner of the screen because this menu is very tiny. For this, go to jwm config then select config menu from the extended menu.
21- It will open up the settings, scroll down and change the y-axis to 1030 which will put this taskbar at the bottom of the screen.
22- Again scroll down until you find Menu Style and change the font from size 9 to size 14 to make it bigger and easier to see. Then press ctrl+S to save the file.
23- After that, refresh the menu by going down to jwm config and then selecting refresh app menu from the extended menu. Now it appears at the bottom, and everything else is much bigger and is clear.
Features Of Distro
1- Distro has a Bluetooth manager which works pretty well. Go into the settings, then go to Bluetooth manager, and you can connect your Bluetooth devices specifically the PS4 controller.
2- Most other distros use a different Bluetooth manager that’s built-in which doesn’t really allow you to pair your PS4 controller although this one should work providing the Bluetooth drivers are working on your PS4 on Linux depending on what kernel version you’re running.
3- To connect the PS4 controller hold down the Share and PS buttons at the same time keep it held down until the light starts flashing that means it’s searching on the Bluetooth manager to try and find our controller it should show up in the manager.
4- Once the PS4 wireless controller appears then right-click and select connect from the drop-down menu. When your controller is connected, then it will emit blue light. You can also connect your Bluetooth keyboard or Mouse in this way.
5- For emulators and games, there are a few built-in emulators. The CMU emulator allows you to run Wii U games although it’s not really going to run well on a PS4 unfortunately unless you can find some games that use more simplistic Graphics.
6- There is also the Dolphin Emulator which allows you to run GameCube and Wii games one should work pretty games like Mario Kart Wii before on thePS4
7- There’s also Duck station which is a PS1 emulator apparently that runs well. There’s also the Nintendo 64 emulator here and the PSP emulator as well as Retroarchy multi-system emulator that allows you to install other emulators and run them through Retroarch, so all of that’s built-in right there there’s also Steam built-in.
8- For Graphics, you always have to make sure that backend is set to Vulkan as it will give you better performance.
9- You can also change the Vulkan compiler. For this, click on the Start menu, then go to the system and select Vulkan Config from the extended menu. From here, you can change it from ACO to llvm as it will make you perform better.
10- In the case of the network make sure you use the steam runtime version to download your games and install updates and when you’re ready to run the game then run the steam on no browser version for this click on the start menu and then click on Network and select Steam(No Browser) which disables the browser to give you better performance or well it gives you more essentially so it uses up less memory than the normal runtime version so because it uses less memory that means more memory towards your games.
11- So if you use the no browser version you just need to select the view tab from the top in the steam settings and select small mode which will then minimize it to your game Library so you can launch your games from there with the no browser version.
12- You also got language support here so you can change your system language and then also you’ve got the keyboard language here. You can change the keyboard layout from this interface. When you change the keyboard layout, then it will also give you the option to change the console layout.
13- There are some other built-in features in the settings or in the system settings. You have the ability to mount the internal PS4 hard drive that only works if you have the hard drive like the decryption key in the correct location that will just Mount the user directory the p on the PS4 hard drive so you can access that from Linux.
14- You also have a tear-free configuration that allows you to fix screen tiering which is ON by default so it kind of minimizes screen tiering which can be quite a problem when running games through Linux here on the PS4, so that kind of fixes that issue you can also turn it off to try and you know to avoid issues that it might cause and then the next feature is Vulcan configure option.
15- Then last but not least you’ve got to change the LED color and fan control so LED color just allows you to change the LED on the front of the console to different colors.
16- Then you’ve got PS4 fan control this is useful if it works on your PS4 it doesn’t always work depending on what model you have but you can basically adjust the temperature of your PS.
If you put it all the way down to 45 then the fans are going to kick up high and keep the PS4 at that temperature so if you’re worried about your PS4 overheating you could adjust this a little bit to kick the fans up a bit higher if you’re using any kind of overclock payloads or you’re trying to overclock the system then obviously you need to keep the fans High to keep the system cool.
17- You also have a few kinds of hotkeys built in if you hold down alt and press F6 it will take a screenshot and also if you hold down alt and press F10 and then F12 it will refresh the screen so if you run into any issues where you know, you lost the signal or something then you can do that to try and regain it.
Setting Up Swap Space
1- Swap space is especially used if you’re going to be running games and emulators because there’s not much memory built into the PS4 and some of that memory gets allocated as video memory which means you have even less Ram to work within the PS4.
2- So conserving memory is very important and if you use up all the memory in your system then the whole system is just going to lock up and freeze completely so if you set up some swap space which allocates some space on the hard drive as you know to use as RAM when you use up all the ram in your system.
3- It just prevents the system from seizing up completely especially if you’re caching a lot of shaders in memory which is what happens within the emulators they cache a lot of shaders so it requires a lot of memory so setting up some swap space is very important.
4- To see how much swap space you currently have in the system is opening up a terminal and write Htop and then a new window will pop up showing you the swap space.
5- To set up some swap space, you need to enter the following command:
Sudo fallocate -l(Number of GB's you want to allocate to Swap space)/swapfile -x
6- After entering this command, press the enter button and then enter the password which is “changeit”. Once the swap space is set up, then you must enable it by entering the following commands:
sudo chmod 600 /swapfilel
sudo mkswap /swapfilel
sudo swapon /swapfilel
7- To enable it automatically whenever you boot into the distro, enter the following commands:
sudo nano /etc/fstabThen a new Window will pop up scroll down to the bottom and then enter the command:
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0After that, press control X to exit and press Y for yes to save. Then press enter then that will save so the swap will be enabled on every boot.
Additional Applications
1- If you’re not used to using a Linux-based system and if you want to install any additional applications for example lutris isn’t installed here. It is basically a multi-system game launcher that has install scripts that can be used to install games and other game launchers to get them to work on Linux so it’s a useful application to have.
To Install it, open the terminal again then enter the Command:
sudo pacman -S lutris or (name of the application you want to install) Then enter the password which is “changeit” and then press y for yes to install and then Lutris is installed on your system.
2- Once it is installed then it will automatically be added to the Games drop-down menu.
3- To update the distro if you can’t install apps, it says there’s out of date packages and stuff like that then you’ll probably have to update the distro you can update the distro as it is recommended unless you just cannot install other applications.
4- To update Distro Enter the Command:
sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys 
5- After entering this command let that run through which takes a while. So once that runs through successfully then Enter the Command:
sudo Pac-Man -Syu
As this will perform the actual system update again type in the password which is “changeit” then press y for yes press and that will install all of the packages now the way this should be set up is that it should be set up in the Pac-Man configuration file to ignore any custom drivers.
Obviously, you don’t want to overwrite any drivers when you’re updating the system like any packages that use custom drivers with the stock drivers otherwise you’re going to run into issues so it should be set up to ignore those packages.
6- If you want to change your password then type passwdI then enter the current password and after it enters your new password.
7- If you want to go back to the PS4 OS then select Orbis OS from the start menu which is the PlayStation 4 operating system. If you select that option, it should first of all just shut down the system and do a normal restart on the PS4 so wait a few seconds.
8- Once you are back on your PS then run the gold hand payload once again so you can just run gold hand version 2.3 or whatever the latest version is. Once you have gold hand running your storage will still look the same so the storage amount as you can see here still says 235 gigabytes free obviously that’s not true there’s an extra 100 gigabytes that’s reserved for the Linux install.
So if you try to install a 100-gigabyte game here it would say there’s not enough storage space even though it looks like there’s enough storage space in the settings.
9- In case you want to delete your Linux installation sometime in the future then all you need to do is reconnect to the PS4 via FTP and then head into the user directory and then the home directory and in there you can see you have a file called linux.img which is 100 gigabytes and that is your Linux installation.
So you can just delete that file if you want to free up space on your system and get rid of your Linux install or if you want to install another distro then just delete that file and then just put another distro in the user system boot folder and then you can just go ahead and run the Linux payload and install a different distro.
10- if you want to boot back into Linux again all you need to do is go back onto your exploit page so again kme ps4.site or any other exploit host and then you can go to the vram payloads and this time you can run a larger video memory payload since you already have the distro installed.
11- You could run the two gigabytes of VRAM payload as it is an all-purpose Linux payload to run is the two gigabytes one that gives you six Gigabytes of system memory and two gigabytes allocated as video memory but obviously, if you’re trying to run a specific game that’s heavy on video memory then you might want to use the three gigabytes of VRAM or four-gigabyte vram payloads.
12- Once you have loaded the payload then it should just automatically boot you straight into the distro so you will get the shell showing up here for a few seconds. If it doesn’t boot again you can type in the resume-boot command a few times but it shouldn’t require that it should just boot you straight in automatically.
If you get the black screen issue then reseat your HDMI cable and then press control alt F2 and F1 to get it to show up here and then obviously you can plug in your peripherals. Once you have the distro actually booted into the shell if you have you know input devices connected when you’re actually loading the payload so just be aware of that.