Brent Baude

As I write this, the OSUOSL mirror now has a BETA version of the minimal install CD for PS3s on it. For those of you who are experienced Gentoo users, this is the minimal CD you know and love. For those who are unfamiliar with minimal install CDs, this CD will boot up to a fairly full-featured commandline interface where you can install Gentoo on the PS3. As with the LiveCD, it contains the ps3pfutils too.

I had hoped to release stage4 tarballs in both 32-bit and 64-bit userlands at the same time, but PPC64 has some problems in its profiles that are breaking the builds for public consumption. I'll need to convince a fellow dev to clean the profiles up as I generally avoid them.

I'll also tip my cards as for the future of PS3 on Gentoo and what we plan to release in support of it. We now have a beta LiveCD, beta InstallCD, and the soon-to-be-released aforementioned stage4's. The stage4s contain everything in a stage3 (os, tools, compilers, etc) but also libspe packages, ps3pfutils, X, fluxbox, some required utilities, hacked fstab, bootloader examples, and a prebuilt kernel. The idea here is to reduce the amount of compilation done on the PS3 given the shortage of RAM.

After the stage4's are out, we'll turn our attention to releasing a bunch of GRP (pre-built binary packages). Things like KDE, open-office, Gnome, XFCE4, Firefox, Thunderbird, and so on would be candidates. The idea here is that a user could emerge these packages, preferably over the network, and have Gnome (or whatever) installed in very little time. I have done this with my PS3 here at home and can have a full system with Gnome installed in just about 15 minutes. Optimally we would like to host these via http somewhere but it does not look like Gentoo mirrors are going to be a possibility. If you are interested in hosting or mirroring these GRP packages, please let me/us know.

The entire team and I have been posting content as quickly as we can at http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/cell/wiki. Check it out...

Happy New Year,

Ranger