Debian Cell Project

Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica (ITA) - Brazil

Important: For information on how to install the version 2.0 of the Cell BE SDK, refer to http://snowbig.blogspot.com/2007/01/installing-cell-sdk-20-on-debian-etch.html. Thanks to Chu Alan!

This web page is designed as an alpha version on how to install IBM's Cell Simulator on a Debian System. IBM's version aims a Fedora distribution. As most of developers in ITA prefer a Debian distribution this will reduce the hands-on time for the simulator, working as a shortcut for Cell developing.
A huge project is under creation. Meanwhile, installations instructions, as well as a modified cellsdk installation script are available for Debian.
Main doubts about install may be forwarded to danielbaggio.at.gmail.com, as well as project details in ITA.
The developer group in ITA would like to thank Dr. Fabio Gandour and Mike Acton (from www.cellperformance.com ) for all efforts made to turn this project into reality.
Daniel Lelis Baggio - ITA Computer Engineering, former Extreme Blue Intern

ITA Cell Research Group is composed by:

Adam Oliveira Alves
Daniel Lélis Baggio
Denis Fillipini Vitti
Diego Alvarez
Diego da Costa Souza
Einstein do Nascimento Junior
Felipe Pedrosa
Humberto Silva Naves
Rafael Adson Barbosa Barros
Samuel Regis Pires Carrijo (Super Legal)
Thomás Cavicchioli Dias

Install instructions

1 - Download IBM's .iso following this link instructions:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cellstartsim/index.html

2 - Mount the iso

# mkdir -p /mnt/cellsdk
# mount -o loop CellSDK11.iso /mnt/cellsdk

3 - Run IBM's install script, under /mnt/software/cellsdk ignoring all script complaints about non-Debian distro. Let it download all the files needed. You'll spend some time under this step, because one of the files has around 450 MB.

4 - This script won't work (it will tell you you don't have the required libraries, even though you might have then, because it will check through rpm which is not the Debian package system).

5 - Manually install all required libraries.

6 - Convert all rpm packages to Debian ones (all .rpm files under /mnt/cellsdk/software/ and /tmp/cellsdk-1.1/ ) except the powerpc ones (unless you are using a powerpc architecture). Use the following command (make sure you have alien installed)

alien --to-deb name_of_rpm_file.rpm

7 - Install all .deb files created through the following command:

dpkg --install name_of_debian_file.deb

8 - Run the modified version of the script (available through this link). Copy it to the /mnt/cellsdk/software folder. As it may not be possible, depending on how you mounted the .iso, it might be a good idea to copy all the files from this folder to another directory, like ~/cell, for instance, and overwrite the original file with this one.

9 - Test it:

mkdir sandbox
cd sandbox
cp /opt/IBM/systemsim-cell/run/cell/linux/.systemsim.tcl .
export PATH=/opt/IBM/systemsim-cell/bin:$PATH
systemsim -g

10- The following screen should come up:

Figure 1 - Cell Simulator Start Up Screen