<p>I have been considering taking the plunge and installing Linux on my Playstation 3.  As C# is my current language of choice, the next logical step would be to install Mono.</p>

<p>I have done a little research and found that <a href="http://psubuntu.com/wiki/InstallationInstructions" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://psubuntu.com/wiki/InstallationInstructions</a> has instruction on installing Ubuntu and links to download an ISO containing a PS3 specific version of Ubuntu.  There is also this cool project at <a href="http://code.google.com/p/celldotnet/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://code.google.com/p/celldotnet/</a> that has developed some code to utilize the 6 additional SPU cores of the CPU, not just the general-purpose one that you have access to by default.</p>

<p>The problem is that the project documentation seems a little thin.  Has anyone set up a PS3 to develop .NET code?  If so, what problems did you encounter?  Does anyone have any code samples of how to even partially load up one of these monster processors?</p>

<p><strong>Update:</strong></p>

<p>I do realize that basic .NET/Mono programming will come into play here.  The part I am fuzzy on is what sort of data structures do you pass to a specialty core?  If I am reading this right, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor#Synergistic_Processing_Elements_.28SPE.29" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the 6 SPU cores have 128 registers at 128 bits each</a>.  I haven't seen any discussion on how to go about coding effectively for this.</p>

<p><strong>Update 2:</strong></p>

<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/11/end-of-the-line-for-ibms-cell.ars" rel="nofollow noreferrer">IBM has announced</a> that further development on the Cell processor has been cancelled.  While this pretty much kills any desire I might have to develop on the platform, hopefully someone else might add some useful info.</p>

[{'answer_id': 140191, 'author': 'Jason Z', 'author_id': 2470, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2470', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>Just found <a href="http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Feb-26.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this posting</a> from Miguel de Icaza\'s blog.  Promising that as recently as Feb 2008 he was looking into this.  As he is <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/users/16929/migueldeicaza">a member of the SO community</a> now, I hope he can shed some further light on the topic.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 192379, 'author': 'kumpera', 'author_id': 21355, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/21355', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>The PS3 features a PPC general purpose CPU.</p>\n\n<p>You can try to cross compile mono to ppc and go from there.</p>\n\n<p>Mono from svn has received a lot of attention regarding the ppc port, so I would advise using it instead of the 2.0 release.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/27153', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2470/']