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Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 Reviewed 368

Posted by CowboyNeal from the walking-the-dog dept.
eobanb writes "I finally wrote a somewhat in-depth review of Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux 4.0. It's basically a PowerPC port of Fedora Core 2. The good? Pretty modern software, and setup is a snap. The bad? RPM sucks as always, and there are a few too many things that are broken out of the box. Linux PPC; it's a niche-within-a-niche, as I heard one Slashdot comment call it, but it may well be worthwhile if you're annoyed by x86 hardware."
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Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 Reviewed More

Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 Reviewed

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  • Or.... (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by elid ( 672471 )
    but it may well be worthwhile if you're annoyed by x86 hardware

    ...more likely if you already have a Mac lying around. Just out of curiosity, why would you be annoyed at x86 hardware?

    • Re:Or.... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Jonathan ( 5011 )
      Just out of curiosity, why would you be annoyed at x86 hardware?

      Well, X86 hardware tends to be loud (yes, I know you can buy special quiet liquid cooled systems, but the typical x86 box is as loud as an air conditioner). Macs (with few exceptions) are whisper quiet

      • Re:Or.... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by kronchev ( 471097 )
        Are you joking? You have to be joking. I pray you're joking. Normal PCs are as quiet as Macs, if youve only used systems set up by idiots, then thats what you'll get, an idiot's system.
        • Seriously, PCs are loud. Both my PC Linux server at home (which I keep in a spare room so it doesn't annoy me), and my PC at work (which does annoy me) are loud. Really, without liquid cooling, what can be done? PCs need powerful fans because x86 chips generate tons of heat.

          • Re:Or.... (Score:3, Insightful)

            by SmittyTheBold ( 14066 )
            If you get good fans, you can have a quite PC. What happens is people get the cheapest possible fans, or one that goes totally overkill, with no regard to noise output.

            The loudest fan in my PC is on the video card; even that I could replace and make much more quiet.
          • I have 3 fans in my PC. Video card, CPU, and exhaust. Oh, almost forgot the 2 fans in the power supply. I can barely hear the fans unless I take the side off my case. It's as quiet, or quieter, than any Mac I've ever seen.

            I don't have an absolute top of the line PC, but it's not too bad. I don't personally like Mac hardware, but then again it's more a personal preference and has almost nothing to do with anything really.
      • My Pentium 3 is whisper quiet. No fan on the processor, and only 2 other really quiet fans, 1 of which turns off when the computer is cool. 1 turns off completely and 1 goes into uberquiet mode when the computer is in standby. That, and the computer is only 3 1/2 inches tall and has a Geforce 4, Audigy, 160GB hard drive and tons more. And its always nice and cool inside. Of course this is nothing like the Pentium 4's (I own one for Windows gaming and can't stand the noise). Ah well, I hope the next generati
      • > X86 hardware tends to be loud

        I guess, if by 'x86 hardware' you mean 'cheap case fans'.

        > yes, I know you can buy special quiet liquid cooled systems

        From Apple, no less. Or did you forget the dual-G5 monstrosities?

      • Are you serious? The Beowulf cluster of xServes I maintain (queue the jokes) would like to argue with you....

        xServes seem to be at least as loud as the Dell Poweredge 1750s (also 1U servers) I've worked with.

        • That's not a fair comparison by any means. The Xserve (or any server) is not a consumer product for use in a home or office (cubicle-type) environment. It's loud because servers are generally stored in an area where it's okay to be loud.

          Apple's desktops and towers, on the other hand, are much quieter than any x86 machine I've ever seen. (Certain models like the Mirrored Drive Doors tower -- aka "Wind Tunnel" -- G4s are the rare exception to that rule.)

          • Apple's desktops and towers, on the other hand, are much quieter than any x86 machine I've ever seen.

            Then you must not have seen many x86 machines, especially recently. The great thing about x86 is the number of options. Last month I built a sub-$400 2GHz machine w/ 512MB and a combo CDRW/DVD drive and 80 gig HD. It's definitely loud. But I could spend another $30 on quiet fans and it would be nearly silent. But on that machine I don't care so I'll save the $30. I also recently built an Athlon 6

      • Pardon my language, but what a crock of sh**. Latest Macs are dustbusters in a nice shrink-wrap (water-cooled 2.5GHz less so), not to mention heat dissipation which is now affecting also higher-end Powerbooks. Try one of mobile AMD64 chips and/or Centrino notebooks, not to mention super-quiet VIA micro computers and attractive (but pricey) Hush solutions and then try talking about something being loud... Don't get me wrong, I could not care less whether I am using a Mac or a PC but when it comes to being
        • I'd pardon your language, but it appears to have become blotted out before I found anything offensive therein.

        • Re:Or.... (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by b-baggins ( 610215 )
          AMD and Centrino notebooks stay cool because the chips get throttled down.

          I have a 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4. I ran it for four months before I even heard the fan come on, and that includes running it docked with the lid closed. At the current moment, my cpu temperature is 36.8 degrees C. My laptop is docked with the lid closed and I've been using my computer for 90 minutes solid. The fan in my system is NOT running.

          Tell me again how your AMD runs so much cooler and quieter. I always enjoy a good laugh.

      • Re:Or.... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Ohreally_factor ( 593551 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @12:37AM (#11174445) Journal
        Would you mind repeating that a little louder? Someone a block over is using a G4 "mirrored door", and their fan kicked in just as you were speaking. =)

    • Re:Or.... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by eobanb ( 823187 )
      Plenty of reasons. My friend's Dell is much thicker, louder, sucks more power, and has a shorter battery life. The only thing it beats my Powerbook in is screen resolution.
      • That's not an x86 issue though. That's just Dell having a junky laptop built (and maybe Windows using too much power).

      • I guess that just depends on the model. If yuou get the cheap 1k Dell laptop, it's probably the case. If you reach prices of the Mac ones (around 3k right?), it really won't be an issue.

        • Re:Or.... (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          If you reach prices of the Mac ones (around 3k right?)

          Actually wrong. iBooks start at $999. PowerBooks at $1599. The only PowerBook that is around 3k is the 17 inch one, which goes for $2799.
    • My reasons for use of yellow dog have nothing to do with annoyance with X86 hardware. It differs from PPC hardware in interesting ways that give each their niche.

      Rather, it's because I'm annoyed with windows. While I have ~6 functioning computers around at any one time, I do the majority of my office, graphics design, and development work on a Mac: Windows is broken and Linux doesn't run Adobe.

      As an active consultant and developer, I upgrade my current desktop mac every 18-24 months.* This means I inev
      • Cue obvious question: Why not use Debian on the Mac(s)? I used to, and it worked a treat. I sold the box when I need a RAID solution as there wasn't space in the old iMac for a second hard drive.

        • IMO YDL is so much easier to install if all you need is a quick 'n dirty box for web development etc.

          Personally I would never use anything but Debian on a production box, but sometimes I simply don't have the time to go through a rather complicated install process with Debian on PPC - which last time I checked was considerably more of a PITA than YDL even though I've installed Debian on x86 plenty of times.

    • Re:Or.... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by forkazoo ( 138186 )
      If you program it in raw machine code with a hex editor, you would get annoyed at it. Have you ever tried to read straight hex when an instruction can be anywhere from one to like 13 bytes long?! Well, neither have I, of course. IMHO, the biggest difference is not in the actual instruction set, but in things like the PC BIOS. I much prefer Open Firmware to a PC BIOS. Also, Macs tend to support strange things like booting from firewire much better than PC's of similar vintage. Power consumption isn't d

  • Has it's place... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vwjeff ( 709903 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @10:38PM (#11173737)
    I work at a school district where we have many (hundreds) of beige Apple G3 All-in-one computers. They can run OSX but not very well. Right now we have a lab set up running Yellow Dog 3. Sure, they take a long time to boot but once they are up and running you have a stable platform that is running the latest software.

    • Re:Has it's place... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mr_don't ( 311416 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:00PM (#11173873)
      Yes, actually, this is a great niche for YDL.

      I have also witnessed YDL 3 turn throw away g3 macs into stable, useful desktop systems, running firefox, snappy word processors like ABIWORD, and things like XMMS and Mplayer for multimedia.

      • thrown away where? :) (Score:2, Interesting)

        by timothy ( 36799 ) *
        It's not hard (in certain parts of the country, anyhow) to find PIIIs being tossed out / nearly free, but I'd like to find a free / cheap G3 system. Where do you see them being thrown out? (Serious question.) My iBook is a G3, and I'm quite happy with it, at least as happy as I could reasonably expect from a 4.5 year old machine ... I would not mind a G3 desktop running Linux.

        timothy

  • more like annoyed with mac hardware (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For the most part mac hardware is good.. but some of the hardware is far from open..

    eg

    1) nvidia chipset on the 12" pb

    1) broadcom on the airport extreme card :-P

    Other than that I love my gentoo powerbook
    • Is there any Linux distribution that has a working Airport Extreme driver? I have an ibook G4 that I've wanted to install Linux on. But it doesn't seem worth the trouble to do it, considering half of the ibook hardware won't work with Linux.
      • "half of the ibook hardware won't work." I'll assume that's just a bit of hyperbole. It is very frustrating, however, for someone like me, who mostly uses my ibook to surf the web and do email (no I'm not an old Korean person!) I wish Open Darwin "www.opendarwin.org/en/about.html" would start with a nice window manager by default. The nice thing about OS X is that you din't need to spend a lot of time installing or setting it up. BTW for other Apple laptops, 3rd party wireless card will work, but not t

  • Yellow Dog 3 on an Old PowerPC = great (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mr_don't ( 311416 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @10:55PM (#11173834)

    I have "brought back to life" a fairly useless 6100 series PowerPC via Yellow Dog. I use it at work as an "everything" server (I know you have a machine like this too!): file server, internal webserver, mailing list server, and probably a dozen other things as I need them. Basically, its performance has been excellent, and it has been running for months at a time without any problems.

    What surprised me was how solid the old powerPC macs were in terms of hardware. The old Apple os9 crashed so much, I could not beleive it was ALL software. I thought, it must be poorly written OS code plus some sloppy RAM/processor/Drive bus engineering! But lo and behold, with YDLinux on the machine, it is as stable as granite.

    • Re:Yellow Dog 3 on an Old PowerPC = great (Score:5, Funny)

      by DirePickle ( 796986 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:01PM (#11173876)
      And as fast, too! I kid, I kid.
    • I have "brought back to life" a fairly useless 6100 series PowerPC via Yellow Dog

      Consider yourself lucky. I never managed to get Yellow Dog 3 installed on a PowerPC 6100 series. IIRC it was sort of a kludge to begin with requiring much of the system's native OS to boot but then switching to yellow dog where it expects to find system. I gave up with much frustration.
      • True, I should have mentioned this, the program (was it called yaboot?) is kinda strange on the old world macs. You do have to have some os9 installed to actually boot 2 linux, it is not perfect... but luckily I don't have to reboot often!
        • I have Yellow Dog 2.3 on a Mac Performa 6360. It would run for months without so much as a hiccup. Hell you'd forget it was even there (it was doing all the routing). Only reason it didn't have yearly uptimes is power outages.
        • True, I should have mentioned this, the program (was it called yaboot?) is kinda strange on the old world macs. You do have to have some os9 installed to actually boot 2 linux, it is not perfect... but luckily I don't have to reboot often!

          Perhaps that was my problem. I only had system 7.5, the last version you can download directly from Apple. I don't remember seeing anything about system 9.x but i'm willing to believe it required what ever I didn't have.

        • Bootx... (Score:5, Informative)

          by vwjeff ( 709903 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @12:37AM (#11174447)
          In order to run Linux on "Old World" hardware you need an application called Bootx

          http://penguinppc.org/~benh/ [penguinppc.org]

          In order for it to work you need a Mac OS installed on the computer. On the beige G3's I have installed it on I usually set it up like this:

          OS 8.1 installed on a 100 MB partition.
          Install Bootx as an extention.
          Install YDL using the remaining HD space.
          All is good.
          • While Linux still can be installed, I wouldn't exactly call it "all being good" if one must jump through various hoops reminiscent of mid 90s to get Linux booting on the pre-G3 "Old World" Powermacs. The need to have an old Mac OS installed? Is it because Apple is still keeping their obsolete (since these machines were never supported by Mac OS X) firmware secrets close to their carbonite chests?

            What I find ironic is that while the classic Mac OS introduced to the public the magic of bootable CDs, these sy

  • Different threading model (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Not exactly. All this means is that threads do not migrate preemptively, nor do they migrate while blocked or switched out while in kernel mode. Threads only migrate if (a) the thread itself wants to move to another cpu or (b) the thread is returning to user mode and the userland scheduler decides to migrate the thread to balance the load out (which only applies to threads associated with user processes since no other type of thread can 'return to usermode').

    Kernel threads almost universally stay on the

  • Aluminium 17" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chrome ( 3506 ) <chrome@stu p e n d ous.net> on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:04PM (#11173891) Homepage Journal
    Um, does it work on my Aluminium 17" yet? Last time I tried linux, the video support was horrible.

    Also, if I can't do dual display, I'm not running it.

    • Re:Aluminium 17" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @01:57AM (#11174806)

      Um, does it work on my Aluminium 17" yet? Last time I tried linux, the video support was horrible.

      There is probably going to be a comment out there that will tell you exactly what you need to do to get linux running perfectly on your powerbook.

      This is not that post.

      This is the post that asks "why?" Googling, I see more than a few sites that suggests linux runs fine on Aluminum powerbooks. Yet your question suggests it doesn't. (Your question is a pretty poor question, btw -- next time tell us more information about the laptop, when you last tried it, and what distro + version you tried.)

      Linux, for all the spiffy easier-to-use distros (Mandrake, Redhat, etc) tends to benefit from a little tweaking and the user experience benefits a lot from more than a little reading. You don't sound like the person who wants to do either. So why not stick with MacOS X? Its a decent system for a lot of tasks, and you can get many open source applications by using fink [sourceforge.net].

      • The reason I asked this, was that about 3-4 months ago I tried various flavours of linux on my machine.

        None of them had a working nvidia driver for the video in my PB 17".

        Yes, I DID spend a long time looking at google. I mean, for fucks sake, who doesn't? Except for complete idiots, and I KNOW you weren't condescending enough to be thinking I'm a complete idiot, right?

        Don't assume that some bleeding newbie is behind every frustrated "Does it work on X" post. Maybe someone who has spent a week staring at
    • Why in $DEITY's name would you want to run Linux PPC on newer hardware? I can see the advantage for older machines that don't run Mac OS X very well (or at all), but a 17" PowerBook?!

  • Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bogie ( 31020 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:09PM (#11173926) Journal
    "RPM sucks as always"

    Actually no it doesn't. In of itself there is nothing wrong with it as a file packaging format. Plus for resolving dependances there is yum and apt-get for rpm. If RPM did indeed "suck" by all reasonable standards I don't think you'd see Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, and the Linux Standards Base using it.
    • I'll second that. From the article "RPM ... pales in comparison to Gentoo's Portage or Debian's Apt." Argh, no. Compare RPM to debian's dpackage. Apt is built on top of dpackage and apt works with RPM too. RPM isn't meant to resolve dependencies, just track them. Systems like apt, yum, or the Red Hat Network handle the dependency issues. As for Portage... *sigh* yeah, we should all build our own software from source and waste tons of cycles doing so. It makes so much more sense to have different bin

      • Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @12:32AM (#11174421)
        Just keep in mind how many people are willing to waste their computer's time compiling as to not waste their time hunting down dependencies. Even those nice RPM package managers will make a mistake. And what about Mandrake users who are stuck with a package that's a year old?

        Again, people use portage because it actually makes installing up to date software easier. The 2% speed increase usually isn't a factor though, so you're reference to funrool loops, while funny, isn't an accurate portrayal of gentoo users.
        • 1- since redhat 9, rhel3, fc*. there is a package called rpmdb-redhat/fedora.xxxxxx.rpm, when you install it, the rpm dependencies are sugested by output of rpm, and if you set up proper a local install repository or with the dependencies in teh same path, use the --aid option allows rpm to install the dependencies (even the dependencies of the dependencies) missing.

          2- 110% agree that gentoo's +2%, does not worth the trouble of compiling the whole system -i.e. emerge openoffice, then wait until summer or s

          • 110% agree that gentoo's +2%, does not worth the trouble of compiling the whole system -i.e. emerge openoffice, then wait until summer or so.

            emerge openoffice-bin

            Learn it before you bash it.

            • Gentoo's Portage handles binary packages quite well, it's just that a) you can't use USE flags with binary packages (one of Gentoo's best features) and b) hardly anyone uses it that way. Gentoo != compile everything
    • It's funny you should mention Yum.

      http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/ [duke.edu]

      As I'm sure you're aware, but quite a few fedora users are not. YUM stands for Yellowdog Updater Modified.

      Obviously its not the actual yellowdog updater for fedora, mandrake, etc, but the original design does in fact come from yellowdog.

      Yellowdog is by far the most hardened mac distribution there is, and for good reason, there are a lot of talented people working at yellow dog.

  • Once I tried Mandrake for PPC, I haven't looked back. Urpmi really helps with rpm ugliness and the large number of free update mirrors is sweet.

    LK

  • Quit Complaining About RPM (Score:5, Insightful)

    by texroot ( 755903 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:16PM (#11173976)
    Apparently this has to be repeated continually for some people to get it:

    Yum and Apt4RPM are to Apt as RPM is to dpkg.

    All the "RPM sucks" comments are stupid. RPM does fine at what it is made for, as does dpkg. RPM does not manage dependancies, that's why Yum, Apt4RPM and the like were developed.

    Now one can compare Yum, for example, to Apt, and that is an apples to apples comparison. Such tools are available to do the same things as Apt, and while the quality of the tools and repositories aren't as mature as those for Apt they're improving rapidly.

    But it's just ignorant to complain about RPM and compare it to Apt or Portage.
    • Eh, yum is nice and all, but I specifically mention that Terra Soft's repository still isn't very big. There isn't even Firefox available. As soon as yum's selection becomes as large as the debian package database, then I'll be happy. The reason I didn't talk a lot about Apt is that Apt isn't included with YDL. Perhaps Terra Soft should have included it, hm?

      • Re:Quit Complaining About RPM (Score:4, Insightful)

        by texroot ( 755903 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @02:05AM (#11174832)
        The point about the repository being limited is valid and informative. But it has nothing to do with RPM.

        It's like saying "hardcover books suck" because you went to a library that had only hardcover books and the selection was limited. Then you go to a second library that has only softcover books but carries a good selection. So you say "softcover books rock". It's not the way it's packaged, it's the selection, as you note above.

        On the other hand commenting about the repositories available for rpm via Yum and similar programs compared to those available for apt is valid to discuss. There are lots of RPM packages, dependancy issues that still exist have nothing to do with RPM (the way they're packaged) and everything to do with the repositories.

        I think that you understand the issue but saying it in the way you did just perpetuates the confusion that seems to still exist about this.

    • Your wrong... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by msimm ( 580077 )
      I agree that RPM itself isn't to blame, but the dependency issues and how their handled is. Yum is no better then the package managers that build the RPM's and my experience with Red Hat/Fedora is that dependency issues are still very much a thing of the present.

      For a long time I sounded exactly like you, impatient with people complaining about a problem I thought long in the past (like Linux sound support or graphics chipset drivers). But I was using Mandrake, the other RPM based distro. With Mandrake (u
      • Well, a lot of my rpm use is with Mandrake and urpmi, though I didn't mention it in my comment. So maybe I've missed a lot of the worst problems still occurring. Yum seemed like a very poor substitute for apt when I first tried it, but it seems much better now. Has been working quite well with FC 3 but I'm just using that for a server distro, and I haven't tried to do more than just update what I've installed from the base install. But I have no complaint if someone wants to compare yum etc with apt. J
        • Agreed. As I recall one of the (many) packages I couldn't update because of the initial update failure was Apt (required an updated version of RPM which required something else which required something else that wasn't available..you know the drill). The RPM's (at least for the AMD64) were a mess. Mandrake..they've definately got some things right. :)

      • Re:Your wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jcostom ( 14735 )
        Yum is no better then the package managers that build the RPM's and my experience with Red Hat/Fedora is that dependency issues are still very much a thing of the present.

        How's that? Yum handles dependencies just fine.

        If I try to install say, the php-mysql package, but don't have the php package already installed, Yum notices that and says (effectively), "Hey, you also need these packages to make this work, I'm going to get them too, ok?"

        • Package management is effectively handled by the RPM's them self. Each packaged RPM contains what is essentially a manifesto, including a list of all contents, where they all belong and of course a list of all required files for the package to be installed. The package manager (Yum/Apt-get/RPM) doesn't know anything not listed in the RPM itself, aside from maintaining a long list of RPM's available from the various media you have plugged into it (CD's its scanned, repositories you've entered, etc). If the d
      • Could you be more specific?

        After having upgraded remotely four systems from RH9 to Fedora Core 3 during last week, using only apt-get, I am really wondering what are you talking about.
    • I'm probably going to get modded off-topic for asking this, but thanks for making me realize what it means when someone says comparing 'apples to oranges'. I remember thinking, 'wtf do apples and oranges have to do with [insert random conversation].' Now I know, thanks!

      Ok, so back on topic. YaST (for SuSE) is horrible at resolving dependencies. On several occasions I've had it try to get old files from the cds, as opposed to using the new ones that were already set as a yast-source and were available.
  • Who found a 'sploit in Slash? 15 of 175 comments? I hate scr1pt kidd1es.

    Ontopic, now that OSX is based on BSD, what's the point, other than "it's cool?" Granted, "it's cool" is a great reason to screw around with stuff when you're bored, but what pratical purpose does this serve? If I'm paying extra bucks for Apple hardware, I might as well use their software.

  • Keep in mind.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Oliver Aaltonen ( 606410 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (nenotlaa)> on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:44PM (#11174160) Homepage
    PPC != Apple alone. While few Apple owners have switched from OS X to Linux, Linux is extremely popular with the other big PPC vendor: IBM. A majority of IBM's servers are PPC architecture. As it is, IBM has an entire division devoted to Linux on POWER [ibm.com]. Also, there are quite a few other distributions that run on the PPC architecture (ie: RedHat, SuSE), and the platform seems to be gaining more and more popularity. So much for this being a "niche-within-a-niche".
    • let's also not forget that PegasOS (or however it's spelled) openPPC logicboard. You can actually build a PPC machine from components, although, I'm not sure if it supports OSX. iirc, it doesn't, but my memory isn't what it used to be.
  • Linux distros specifically for Apple hardware should work really well since Apple's got a lot less hardware that you need to worry about being compatable with. That said, I can't get audio working on my 6500 :/

  • a reason to use Yellow Dog (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My employer uses it because we have many mission critical legacy programs that were written on Harris mainframes. Its that big vs little endian thing. So, we are using PPC servers with Yellow Dog. The programs are huge and cannot be converted for many reasons.
    So, there are uses for it.

  • Torrents (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by Yonder Way ( 603108 )
    For those of you that can't RTFA, the torrents are here:
    http://cvs.terraplex.com/~owen/ydl4_torrents/ [terraplex.com]

    Download early and often.

    The reviewer was a whiny kid that tried comparing OS X to Linux, and then pitched a fit because he like Debian & Gentoo better than Red Hat but YDL runs like Red Hat. Boo hoo. The review didn't really say much worth reading.
    • I think the parent was unfairly modded as flaimbait.

      While the parent post may seem brash, it did make a couple of points.

      I agree the "review" did read too much like a rant, used operational details as filler text as opposed using it as supplimental information, and made some huge generalities of the technology used within Yellow Dog

      Basically, this was a average to below average article.

      But to be fair... The reviewer could seem brash, and made some valid points too. ;)

  • It amazes me the amount of "Free software" users that use Mac OSX. I dont think they are about Free Software or they wouldnt be running it. Its about "Not Windows" for those people, it just happens to run some free software. Mac OS X is propriatary. For those of us who do want to run Linux on their ppc, there is yellowdog (covered in article above) or Fedora for ppc. Colin Charles has covered the install process at http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/ibook/fedorappc.h t ml And the release announcement: ht
  • I am frustrated because I cannot get the wireless networking running under YDL4 on my PowerBook. I would think all distros would have wireless covered by now, for any and all platforms.

    [shrug?]

    • Re:As for me... (Score:3, Informative)

      by andreyw ( 798182 )
      Not an (i|Power)Book owner (yet!!) but AFAIK there is no Airport Express support in YDL. So if you have an iBook or PB12" you will have to get a USB WiFi adapter, or get another PCMCIA WiFi card for the rest of the PBs. I recommend anything based on the PrismII chipset (use wlan, orinoco_cs, or hostap drivers). Btw, if you are going to buy a Linksys WPC11 - get v.3. AVOID WPC11 v.4 - its based around some obscure Realtek chipset and the drivers suck (and are x86 only, and crash on anything older than 2.4.18
  • Im getting replies from like 20 different articles in this Yellow Dog Linux articles. WTF?

  • RPM 'sucks as always' ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by R-2-RO ( 766 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @02:48AM (#11174992) Journal
    I see a lot of people say RPM sucks, but rarely do they post an explanation. I started on Slackware in '93/'94 and moved to Redhat in '95/'96 and loved RPM. I used and loved RPM for quite sometime before moving on to Gentoo a couple of years ago. But I still like the RPM system. In all the years I used it, I never had any major complaints. *shrugs*
  • Now, let's see if the editors would allow a "Deb packaging sucks and is too political, as always" onto the front page.
    • Theres a BIG difference then trolling on the front page, (IE: RPM SUCKS) and stating fact (IE: "Deb packaging sucks and is too political, as always")

      The difference, you see trolls on the front page, and rarely fact, thats what linking to the article is for, let someone else deal with the pesky facts ...

      Did you read the review? RPM Sucks is just one of many wonderful inexperienced writings that come out in this review. Ohh well what do you expect, its christmas eve, no one is home =)

  • Ubuntu (Score:2, Informative)

    by indigo78 ( 464058 )
    May I also suggest the good ubuntu port for PowerPC? I'm using that on my 15" Al, aside with OS X, and it seems to be built very well...
  • I hate efficient, inexpensive, fast x86 hardware that I can buy anywhere in the world at a fraction of the price of PPC hardware. It justs so annoying to have all of this commodity hardware so readily available everywhere I turn... so damn annoying.
  • A couple of iterations ago, setup was only a snap if it worked first time on your box. Who uses Yellow Dog Linux, anyway? I thought it was one of those military contract spin-offs Steve Jobs gets from his old NeXT spook connections?

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