cjwatson wrote a forum post on the current state of PSUbuntu development. Basically it’s a team of three at Canonical who have been working on Ubuntu support for the PS3. Now they could use some help on development and architecture for the platform.

If you’re up for the challenge here’s a summary of what the team needs help with:

• Testing CD images (especially daily builds just before milestone releases) of the development release, and reporting bugs in time so that developers can fix them.
• Triaging (gathering information on and assessing importance of) bug reports about PS3.
• Ensuring that the Ubuntu kernel contains necessary patches from the upstream PS3 Linux development tree, and keeping our ps3-kboot package in sync with changes such as device tree layout that happen there.
• Fixing bugs in critical components such as the Ubuntu installers, HAL, and others that require explicit handling of PS3.

Seems like a great way to learn more about Linux development and architecture. More info can be found in this forum post.

The developers could also inform us that they are currently working on new custom 7.10 builds for the PS3!

Matt Zimmerman, chairman of the Ubuntu Technical board, posted a message regarding the future state of Ubuntu on the PowerPC architecture (the one the PS3 is running).

Beginning with Ubuntu 7.04, the PowerPC edition of Ubuntu will be reclassified as unofficial. The PowerPC software itself and supporting infrastructure will continue to be available, and supported by a community team.

So basically development on Ubuntu for the Cell architecture is up to the community now, due to a lack of funding and resources. But as Zimmerman writes:

It is possible that PowerPC will once again become a fully supported architecture in the future, if the resources needed to guarantee its quality are found. The architecture is certainly gaining large numbers of users in embedded and console devices, and there are many reasons to continue to work with the platform.

I’m sure the Ubuntu community will provide some excellent releases. And if Ubuntu keeps gaining ground among PS3-users, this might make it worth some official support again in the future.

See the Ubuntu Wiki page for arguments and the Launchpad page for a list of current team members.