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Maybe I'm missing something, but why would I want to install YDL.

Well, maybe because timothy says "I have been running YDL 2.x for about a year now, and it's a fast, stable distro."

Except for that whole crashing thing, of course. It crashes during install and it crashes during configuration. But if you just pop the CD in, then timothy's right, it's a fast, stable distro, if you want to use your powerbook as a paperweight or a doorstop.

They do. The Real client works decently. Check out this link on imaclinux.net for info on how to install it. The information might be a little stale but the links on the page are still good and should get you what you want.

Now click here for a better radio station to listen to, KGO

If you're tied to ix86 or other hardware your best and cheapest way has got to be sf.net and the compile farm that was suggested in one of the other comments.

If you're porting a lot of GUI apps and want to make use of the better parts of OS X (Quartz, etc...) you'll be better off with a real box with you logged in on the console. Search google for "kCGErrorIllegalArgument: initCGDisplayState: cannot map display interlocks" for a glimpse of the frustration you'll be putting yourself through trying to port large apps with only shell access to the build environment.

Shot in the dark if you have a non-NuBus PPC box...
I remember the Mac-on-Linux team was rumored to be working on OS X support over a year ago. Mac-on-Linux is a Linux/ppc application that will run Mac OS 8.6/9.x without a ROM image. Not much use if you're on x86/sparc/etc...

I would treat this report about firmware problems as heresay. Check with iMacLinux.net, who reported the reason for the hardware problems. A faulty power cable can cause random failures to powerup and some units to not power up at all on the first time. Customs delays along with difficulty in manufacturing the unit, are all real confirmed reasons for why the iMac shipments are delayed.

Look at the bogomips here. A massive 797 of them from their speedy 800mhz iMac.

model name Pentium II (Deschutes)
cpu MHz 451.032
cache size 512 KB
bogomips 897.84

model name Pentium III (Coppermine)
cpu MHz 601.371
cache size 256 KB
bogomips 1199.31

model name AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
cpu MHz 1202.748
cache size 256 KB
bogomips 2398.61

I think you get my point.

I love my macs. In fact, I have three (G4/400, iBook 500, PB1400/G3-333), and plan on getting one of those LCD iMacs one day, but that's some pretty low bogomips there from that G4.

And slightly off topic, I'd like the ability to paste in three or four lines of output from a standard linux command thanks and not get messages telling me to remove junk characters.

I'm not sure which the joke is - iMacx (hmm, that SuperDrive http://www.imaclinux.net/images/imac-g4/install/su perdrive.jpg looks pretty hot) or the time.

Another joke...
--joshua

Not to nitpick, but either this isn't a screenshot but just a photo, or we did slip into the Matrix without me noticing.

http://playground.sun.com/1275

If instead, you are refering to the Mac Toolbox that used to live in the ROM, you would still be wrong. This has not been the case since the first iMac's were rolled out in 1998. Machines prior to this era are now refered to as Old World Macs while those that came after this change are refered to as New World macs.

http://www.imaclinux.net/gh.php?single=76%2Bindex= 0

iMacLinux has several articles up about this. Looks like they scooped both slashdot and yahoo.. :)

It used to be at ppclinux.apple.com but the site isn't around anymore. Might try this site penguinppc.org/files/users/beelers/ibook.html or contacting Benjamin Herrenschmidt penguinppc.org/~benh/.

Another good site is www.imaclinux.net/

Typos in HTML suck, don't they?

The correct link is: iMacLinux

And the URL is: http://www.imaclinux.net

Have a nice post-holiday Tuesday.

John Buswell replied the following to his own article on imaclinux.net:I understand the concept, my problem is with calling it a donation and trying to present it in a way that tries to blur the line between donating to Mandrake and donating to open source projects. Out of the entire Mandrake distribution, I'd guess that less than 30% of it is actually work done by MandrakeSoft themselves, while the remaining 70% is work done by other open source projects. Up until now, I've seen MandrakeSoft's willingness to put their distribution up for free for all (unlike other vendors) was their good faith and good will towards the open souce community, and their way to contribute back in a big way. I mean after all, think of all the money they've made from retail sales and deployment of corporate solutions over the years. You don't see them sharing the spoils with various open source projects that make their distribution, sure I realise that is unpractical, but if they want to put up some kind of contribution page, they should have it state clearly that it is for people who don't want to purchase the retail and want to give back. Also eliminating the automatic price of $19.99 that pops up would show that they are not trying to sell something... I wonder if they are liable for tax on donations?

If you check his homepage he has posted a bit of an update down the page.

He says: my problem is with calling it a donation and trying to present it in a way that tries to blur the line between donating to Mandrake and donating to open source projects. Out of the entire Mandrake distribution, I'd guess that less than 30% of it is actually work done by MandrakeSoft themselves, while the remaining 70% is work done by other open source projects. Up until now, I've seen MandrakeSoft's willingness to put their distribution up for free for all (unlike other vendors) was their good faith and good will towards the open souce community, and their way to contribute back in a big way. I mean after all, think of all the money they've made from retail sales and deployment of corporate solutions over the years. You don't see them sharing the spoils with various open source projects that make their distribution, sure I realise that is unpractical, but if they want to put up some kind of contribution page, they should have it state clearly that it is for people who don't want to purchase the retail and want to give back. Also eliminating the automatic price of $19.99 that pops up would show that they are not trying to sell something...

If you check his homepage he has posted a bit of an update down the page.

He says: my problem is with calling it a donation and trying to present it in a way that tries to blur the line between donating to Mandrake and donating to open source projects. Out of the entire Mandrake distribution, I'd guess that less than 30% of it is actually work done by MandrakeSoft themselves, while the remaining 70% is work done by other open source projects. Up until now, I've seen MandrakeSoft's willingness to put their distribution up for free for all (unlike other vendors) was their good faith and good will towards the open souce community, and their way to contribute back in a big way. I mean after all, think of all the money they've made from retail sales and deployment of corporate solutions over the years. You don't see them sharing the spoils with various open source projects that make their distribution, sure I realise that is unpractical, but if they want to put up some kind of contribution page, they should have it state clearly that it is for people who don't want to purchase the retail and want to give back. Also eliminating the automatic price of $19.99 that pops up would show that they are not trying to sell something...

Newworld Macs (iMac and later) usually require a boot partition for Linux, too (to hold the txbi script that OpenFirmware loads to load the yaboot booter on a Linux paritition). Old World (Biege) Macs don't need a bootstrap, there booter, quik, can boot directly off of a Linux partition.

I've done some info on these booters over at iMacLinux Guides and Howtos. Also check out PenguinPPC for more stuff.

Ok. I did some more research. It'll probably get all lost in this thread.

However, imaclinux has reported that it's possible to watch DVDs on LinuxPPC.

They link to this location.

I only have ydl, so I'm not able to give it a spin.

As another note, could I get in trouble for posting this? I guess it's too late if your reading it.

FYI, Linux PCC guru Stew Benedict has a great article in this month's Linux Journal, "Yellow Dog Linux on the iMac." He gives a good overview of the process, the benefits and drawbacks to YDL, etc.

FWIW, I use Yellowdog (I have for over a year), and I absolutely love it. There's nuthin' prettier than Helix Gnome on an iMac. :)

-Waldo
-------------------

Personally I can't wait for SlackPPC or Slackintosh to be usable. I installed the beta of SuSE and found it more intuitive and easier to use than LinuxPPC (which can be messy), but both are RPM based and I almost always screw up the RPM database after a few weeks of use (sigh - yeah I know, this is my fault, but it isn't a problem with slackware). I haven't messed with Debian yet but that might be a good interim alternative.

DrBen

LinuxPPC is not too bad for installing..i'm running it on my iMac, and its making use of my system resources is a way MacOS can only dream of..in other words..for true multi-tasking /stability..go for linuxppc. Printing is a real bitch though for non-PS printers, and Staroffice does not compile..
imaclinux

ok i was gonna make some bland comment on how yay for macs yay for linux but then i got distracted.. i went to imaclinuxand justsomething about their layout looked so darned familiar.. now maybe its my trained eye but, i dunno im probablyt just drunk on newcastle

I think Apple makes a fine product. My family's business gets approx. 50% of sales through a catalog, and every print company we've used ALWAYS uses mac. There is one computer in the whole joint of our current printer that isn't made by appple. It's stunning to see such market saturation - apple is the standard platform for desktop publishing (as far as I've seen at least and this is coming from experience). It does work very well for it as well

The Mac OS isn't as arcane as Linux, pretty much always a new-bie computer, yet, powerful enough for the most demanding media professionals. I know some trade graphics artists too, and if I sat them down in front of a Linux box they'd cry at the complexity. These are people driven by the creative process, not by the wonderful efficiency and power of an Operating System (Linux for example).

One more point, the iMac line has SAVED Apple. I've made good money on Apple in the stock market too, and I'm sure I wouldn't have been looking at Apple as a profitable investment had Steve Jobs not come back as the Interm CEO.

If you haven't visited the iMac Linux site, they in fact are running slash! How nice.

...and throw away machine cycles, maybe PHP _is_ cool. But if you rather have an organized, object oriented web development interface, with multithreaded persistent database connections, a standalone web server, plugable modules and no overhead per call, try Zope. All the great new sites use it, like AppWatch, Technocrat and iMacLinux. Why? How about going from drawing board to full featured site in 2 weeks? And please don't mention the PHP + MySQL combo, the MySQL license sucks. OpenSource rules, I don't care about the rest.