Introduction

I don't have access to a ps3 yet so much of what you read it is due queries to ps3 owners, poking in the sources available, deductions and wild guesses. Beware. You can ask for help and/or tell your success on #gentoo-ppc64 on freenode.

NOTE a pretty good quide is available on a fellow user site, you may want to check http://www.daniel.jp/joomla/info/ps3/installing-gentoo-on-the-ps3.html for a good walkthrough, hopefully I'll convert to guidexml and put it on the standard gentoo documentation once we are done with the other details.

kboot

The ps3 boot system can let you run an OtherOS as described there, in short it can run a elf from a determined position and nothing more: simple, yet effective. Kboot let you have everything (and much more) you expect from a recent and sane firmware/bootloader using linux features like kexec and the great busybox. You make the ps3 firmware boot kboot (that acts as a smart bootloader) and then you can do maintenance tasks (like installing gentoo) from there or just boot to the "real" linux system.

when you run kboot it just presents itself like that

kboot:

If you let the time pass it has a default action that will boot the real system, otherwise you can use it as a simple shell, if you are sick of reading "kboot:/path" just type sh and you get the default busybox/ash shell.

If you want to set the network you have udhcpc and ifconfig provided by busybox, since kboot could set things up for you you may just have to edit /etc/resolv.conf.

Install

Thanks to kboot installing is dead easy for gentoo, the instructions already present in the Gentoo Handbook are already fine. Just follow them using the gcc4 profile for G5 and cell-source (that has a cell_defconfig you can use) and you should end up with a pretty functional system (w/out support for spu)

Xorg configuration

You have to use fbdev, so it's plain simple, it is suggested to disable shadowfb since it makes no sense in this case.

Option "ShadowFB" "false"

NOTE our Xorg configuration tool will probably integrate the ps3ps_utils tool for vidmodes and will produce a correct xorg.conf soon, thanks to JoseJX