People tend to think that gone are the days when the “RPM Hell” used to exist. We have yum, aptitude and what not! If you install linux on a PS3, I’d like to bring you back to reality, especially like me when you have yellowdog 5.0 installed on a first gen PS3.
What is interesting is that all these package managers rely on repositories in /etc/yum.repos.d/*.
If you do not have the good repositories then you can kiss goodbye to installing the Cell Broadband Engine SDK provided by IBM. This SDK has the spu-gcc, spu-g++ which is the right set of compilers if you want to use the 1 master processor (Power Processor Element – PPE) and the other six SPE (Synergistic Processor Elements – SPEs) …think of these as slaves. You might wonder where’s the 7th of the cell processor, well, you cannot access it because it is used internally by the PS3 for virtualization.
So I got a yellow dog 5.0 iso image from here. I followed the instructions for installing it from here. I did this almost a year ago! Yes…I did actually keep it dead for a while! Then I installed gcc and compiled John the ripper! To my utter disappointment, there was no performance benefit!
Then Marc Bevand told me at Toorcon X that I needed spu-gcc to compile JTR on PS3 to get the benefits. So I got the cell sdk ISO from here. I then mounted the ISO.
mount -o loop cellsdk11.iso /mnt/disk
cd /mnt/disk
cd software
./cellsdk install
I got bunch of errors. It wanted me to install freeglut-devel and tk-8.4.*.
Thus began my journey of 10,000 steps to get the dependencies resolved and I burnt my fingers, keyboard, brains, etc….and although I realized that everyone in the US and the world had found hope…things were not looking bright for me! Until I bumped into this fantastic repository here. Trust me it took me about 8 hours of incessant installing and compiling (almost 120 odd different files) and scores of google searches to land me into this. I installed the glut, libx11, tk, tcl, libtcl, glut-devel, libstdc++, libstdc-so7, and many other packages that I cannot even recall now to get the cellsdk to work! And even though I did, I still couldnt get ./cellsdk install to work! After about 8 hours of effort and being so close to success just seemed evil. Then I realized that all the packages needed were related to the PPC64 simulator (libx11.ppc64, libtcl.ppc.64, etc.)…a quick look into the readme told me that I could neglect that using the –nosim directive to make it work.
Finally,
./cellsdk install –nosim
worked!!!!!
A small step for mankind but a giant step for me!