Brent Baude

There are new PS3 stages, a minimal cd, and a livecd on the Gentoo mirrors. This hopefully brings a close to the firmware upgrade fiasco. Good luck

If you are an avid PS3 Gentoo user, you know now that Sony's latest 2.10 firmware breaks Gentoo and some other Linux distributions as well. There was a small bug in the frame-buffer code that caused this failure. The conspiracy theorists read more into it but I frankly felt like it was a simple code regression.

If you are unlucky enough to have run into this problem and your Gentoo install does not work, I have authored a short document on how to recover your install. Please visit http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/cell/wiki/Rescue for this information.

One of the downsides of this issue is that it rendered the media and stages I created just a few days ago completely useless. They are no longer on the mirrors. I'm rebuilding all the media as this is being written. The stages and livecd should be available tomorrow at the latest (the minimal cd referenced in the rescue document was mirrored today).

I'll post when the new media begins to hit the mirrors. As always, if you have questions, come hang out with us on #gentoo-ppc64 on irc.freenode.net. If you have questions about recovering your install, please ask there. If you have suggestions and improvements for the rescue document, please send them to me. Don't you dare write a bugzilla entry!

Although it was tested, I wrote it hastily and my tester is quite the experienced Linux user so we admittedly do not make the best testing subjects.

Happy Holidays.

Brent

I have resolved the PS3 GRP build problems with some help from the fine folks in #gentoo-desktop. The 32bit GRP is already on the mirrors and the 64bit GRP is being uploaded and should be available within the next few hours.

As a note, XFCE4 and some other packages like subversion, have been removed from the GRP builds because they are shipping as part of the stage4.

Instructions on how to install GRP for the PS3 can be found at http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/cell/wiki/InstallGentooOnPS3

Happy Hunting

As I type this, a new set of stages, a new liveCD, and a new minimal CD are being pushed to the Gentoo mirrors. I'll detail the new media and stages below.

Stages

I have built both 64-bit and 32-bit userland-based stages. Both run a 64-bit kernel. The new stages are more mature than previous ones based on user feedback. My intent was to make the stage more immediately usable for users, especially new and new-to-Linux users.

The new stages contain XFCE4, XFCE4-extras, Mozilla Firefox (Web browser), Mozilla Thunderbird (Mail), xchat (IRC client), pidgin (Instant Messenger) and Audacious (music). It also includes many of the basic applications for the development environment, like subversion, cross-dev, and so forth.

Once the new stage is extracted, configured, and reboot, your PS3 will load up into GDM and you can login and begin using your PS3 immediately.

Be certain you are following the instructions located at http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/cell/wiki/InstallGentooOnPS3 .

Install Media

I have remade the popular PS3 LiveCd with few a few changes, which is a usable Gentoo graphical environment on CD/DVD media. When I released the new stages in November, I did not rebuild the LiveCD because of portage tree instability. This latest LiveCD is based on 2.6.23 and contains updated XFCE and other desktop applications. It is also noticeably larger and requires that you burn it as a DVD or run it off USB. Directions for the latter can be found at http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/cell/wiki/BootLiveCDfromUSB .

The minimal installcd has also been updated. Because the prior minimal installcd was based on 2.6.23, this new version only has updated packages but is otherwise largely the same.

GRP

Building GRP still remains a problem. I'll continue to work on it. I'm currently trying to work out a problem building Gnome where it fails with various XML problems. It seems that building GRP is a continuous problem and I am contemplating dropping support for GRP.

What's Next

I would like think this is the last set of stages I would need to build without some improvement in other things. For example, I think I will begin to invest my time into created both cell and cell/ps3 profiles in the portage tree to ease the release engineering aspect of these builds. I also want to build a set of stages based on gcc-4.3 so we can begin to bring in a number of cell-based optimizations.

Thanks and best of luck. Please provide feedback as appropriate. Join us on IRC at #gentoo-ppc64.

Happy Holidays, Peace on Earth and all that stuff,

Brent aka Ranger