Brent Baude

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