so i've been looking into the state of things with running debian on my ps3, and while talking to some folks on #cell, it was brought to my attention that there was a problem or two with the libspe2 packages, used for programming SPU using applications.

for those not in the loop, the Cell Broadband Engine chip which powers the ps3 is a multi-core processor, with two general purpose PPU's and 6 specialized SPU's available. Without spufs support, the SPU's aren't available, and the real number-crunching capabilities of the ps3 aren't either.

more information on the nitty-gritty of spufs is available here

anyway, the problems are fixed now

still, as of now there's still some one-time setup after installation. namely:

    echo spu    /spu    spufs   defaults    0   0 >> /etc/fstab

(and then mount it or just reboot)

there really should be some way to have this setup automatically, either from the installer or through some kind of spufs support package. i'll take it up on the mailing lists and see what the consensus would be for this.