14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical, through Colin Watson, announced a few minutes ago that starting with today, December 14th, they will no longer build ISO images for the PlayStation 3 gaming console.
On April 1st 2010, Sony dropped the support for Linux-based operating systems on their PlayStation 3 gaming console, by removing the "Other OS" option from XMB (XrossMediaBar). This happened with the firmware version 3.21, released on that day.
Apparently, the Ubuntu developers were still cooking daily builds of the Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) port for PS3. But with today's announcement, PlayStation 3 owners who love Linux, especially the Ubuntu flavor, will have to look for another operating system designed for the PowerPC architecture.
"I've stopped daily PlayStation 3 CD builds on cdimage.ubuntu.com. Changes made by Sony to the "Other OS" facilities of the PS3 have made it increasingly difficult for people with new systems to run Ubuntu on them, and there seem to be hardly any developers with the interest and ability to keep the CD images working."
"Building separate CD images for PS3 takes a substantial amount of resources (disk space, time required to run the powerpc and powerpc+ps3 live filesystem builds sequentially, developer time to fix problems, and so on), and right now it doesn't seem to be worth it." - says Colin Watson in the official announcement.
It appears that the process of creating these daily ISO images is very time consuming and no one is interested in taking over the development. Therefore, starting with Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), Canonical will no longer provide CD images for the popular PlayStation 3 console, and the PowerPC architecture.
"Since the PS3 uses powerpc binaries, it should still be possible to upgrade PS3 systems to newer versions of Ubuntu for the foreseeable future, provided that they were initially installed with a version earlier than Natty."
"If you have a good reason why we should keep building PS3 CD images for Natty, and are willing to step up as a developer to help support them, then please reply to ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com." - added Colin Watson in today's announcement.