I've made some serious progress! After a lot of blood, sweat and determination, I more or less have Gentoo running on my PlayStation 2. Here's what I have at the base.- linux 2.4.17
- binutils 2.14
- gcc 3.0.4 (C and C++)
- uclibc 0.9.27 (quite recent!)
- xorg 7.0
In terms of how much "fiddling" with Gentoo is necessary, I have written ebuilds for all the extra packages. There's a few patches involved and they will need some further adjustments before they can be officially accepted but most of the work has been done there. I've written my own Portage profile, which lives in /usr/portage/profiles/uclibc/mips/ps2. It's basically a combination of mips/ps2/uclibc/2.4 stuff.
As I said above, I more or less have it working. I have a few outstanding problems but none of them are showstoppers and with a bit of help, I think we can have a fully working system. Yeah! So here's the list.
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emerge system
"emerge system" is almost complete. I think psmisc, busybox and kbd are failing due to uclibc-specific issues. No biggy. busybox can be made to work if you leave out hdparm and I have actually seen it working. The problems might even be 0.9.27 specific because I tried 0.9.28 before (broken on MIPS) and busybox compiled with that no problem.
epatch always fails
This is a pretty weird problem. Portage works fine except that epatch, the function used for patching, always fails, even though the debug output shows that the patch applied cleanly. I only run Portage on the PS2 for the stubborn packages and I can easily unpack/patch the files using ebuild on my PC. Setting FEATURES="keepwork" stops the PS2 from screwing it up again.
gcc 3.2.2
A more recent version of gcc would be nice. gcc 3.2.2 was ported to the PS2 by MrHTFord but that version wasn't for Linux. I monkeyed around with it for ages, trying to get it to work but the best I managed was a statically compiled "Hello World". Anything more resulted in bus errors or segmentation faults. The main problem was that the compiler was geared for 64-bit and I had to hack the crap out of the specs file to get it back to 32-bit. As far as I understand it, we can't use 64-bit until we have a 64-bit kernel for the PS2. Pigs will fly before that happens. Still, I think I wasn't far off from getting gcc 3.2.2 to work, maybe someone with better knowledge can figure it out.
Graphical support (Xorg / XDirectFB / framebuffer) UPDATED 23rd May 2006
We are now in a MUCH better position in this area than we were a month ago. At that time, I firmly believed that we were going to need someone very experienced to write a new driver for us. I decided to have a shot at updating the framebuffer driver from 2.2.1 myself. Despite never having done any real kernel hacking before, I somehow managed to pull it off. You should have seen my face the first time it worked.
So where are we at now? We have a fully functioning, albeit somewhat inefficient, framebuffer driver. Despite the inefficiency, it runs lsdldoom at full speed without problems. We also have modular xorg 7.0 running on the fbdev driver. Early indications show that it is working well. While all this is sufficient for simple desktop apps, it is perhaps less than sufficient for anything more intensive like games. The basic requirement here is to get some 2D acceleration working. This would involve porting XDirectFB to xorg 7.0 and writing a DirectFB driver specifically for the PS2. I anticipate that I may be able to do both of these things myself. More advanced requirements in the form of 3D acceleration would probably require writing DRI/DRM drivers. I anticipate that this may be beyond my capabilities. Having said that, I seem to recall there being some existing 3D acceleration on the original distribution. I don't know at this point whether any of that code is still useful.********************
Okay so that's pretty much all the problems I've encountered. Anyone care to help? Let me know and I'll send you a tarball of my system as it stands. I'm netbooting my system over NFS but you can use a hard drive if you prefer. If you want to help out but don't have the PS2 Linux DVD, which is needed to boot then send me a PM.
i only asked this because it is getting harder to find the linux kit and if possible i would like to avoid getting it if possible
I didn't want to say this because I don't want to be hauled up as some pirate - I don't condone piracy. It's true, I don't have the kit. The only part of the kit you actually need that you can't buy separately is the first DVD. It has the PS2Linux RTE on it. The problem is that you can't buy the kit at all anymore, let alone buy the DVD separately. Yeah sometimes you can get in on eBay but it's like gold dust there. Because of all that, I had to download the first DVD via torrent and use certain risque methods to make it work. Some people might say "Well I bought the kit, why didn't you?" but I didn't get into this until recently. They stopped selling it years ago. If Sony were to start selling the DVDs again, separately from the kit and at a reasonable price than I would certainly buy it. I don't want to make further excuses for myself but I think it may be fair to say that the kit's price was largely to cover the cost of the hardware rather than the software anyway.
Consequently I've started working on bringing the framebuffer driver to 2.4. I've only ever made small adjustments to the kernel before but it seems to be working out. Despite the fact that the PS2-specific code was moved all over the place between 2.2 and 2.4, I have managed to fix several compiler errors so far. This is what's left!
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It works!! It bloody well works!! 
