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Yellow Dog Linux 2.0 Review
Patrick Mullen writes: "The Duke of URL has just posted its review of Yellow Dog Linux 2.0 - Linux for the PowerPC. The review covers installation, the interface, YUP (their own apt-like update/install tool), benchmarks of PPC VS. X86 and much more."
I'm in the middle of my 5th try at the yellowdog install at work, and burning time on /. as the stupid yellow progress bars fly across the screen next to me (again). GCC and network setup scripts (python) broken in the default install! This would proabably be a good distro if I could use those two things! I also dont like that you can't select individual packages in the install. Argh, oh well, back to work...
everything is slower
try big file copies, try compiles, make a simple program in C, it will load slower and be slower whenever it is in syscalls. everything will be slower. os x uses mach, so the base system has one area of overhead that monolithic kernels don't. the operating system is simply slower.
there are other reasons apps are slower than just the graphics system. the bloated system libraries for instance, but even things that don't use them have mach to help them lose their edge.
ps. i'm using yellowdog 2.0 and tri-booting the mac oses, so this isn't entirely out of my ass. however, plenty of it is, the only benchmarks i have done were compiles.
- Macs that can run YDL sell used for around $500 or less (I had Slash running on YDL 1.x on an iMac rev. B (G3/233, 128MB RAM)).
- Many people have old usable Macs lying around collecting dust.
- Many Mac users thinks Mac OS X (currently) sucks, and it is not an option. Besides, you get to use real Mac OS under YDL, while under Mac OS X you have to run your apps in Classic which, while it has obvious advantages, also has obvious disadvantages.
As to speed: Mac OS X is slower than LinuxPPC. Period. I can't give all the reasons why. But everything I do on Mac OS X is slower than on Linux (I have my PowerBook with all three OSes: YDL 2.0, Mac OS X 10.0.4, and Mac OS 9.1, tri-booting with yaboot). I compiled perl 5.7.2 the other day on each, and `sh Configure -des -Dusedevel` took about five times as long just to get started, and took about 2-3 times as long to make.Is it HFS+? Is the running UI slowing things down even though this is running in a console? Are the compiler and shell utilities not compiled well? Is it all of these? I dunno. It is just slower. Everything is slower.
I won't even bother with why I don't like Mac OS X's UI (NeXTisms) or its Unix idiosyncracies (NeXTisms).
What I will say is that YDL 2.0 has a few glitches, yaboot was a pain to set up for some reason, but now that it is running it works well.
Of course, I still spend 95 percent of the time in Mac OS 9.1. :-)
What the review doesn't say is that there's no way to upgrade to YDL2.0. (At least, there wasn't a month ago, and I haven't seen anything on the mailing list or the website to indicate that's changed yet.) I bought the YDL2.0 CDs the moment that they were available (maybe 6 weeks ago), hoping to upgrade my YDL1.2 machine. No such luck. Frustated, I bought up the topic on the mailing list, but it devolved into a bit of a flame war, unfortunately. I was told that if I had any sense, I'd wipe my machine and re-install from scratch, that there's no reason I couldn't wait for an upgrade path, etc.
Anyhow, if you're a user of an earlier version of Yellow Dog Linux, do yourself a favor and hold off. What would lead Terrasoft to release a 2.0 final release that lacks the ability to upgrade from previous versions is beyond me. But don't make the same mistake that I did.
-Waldo
I decided on doing a make vmlinux because Yellow Dog didn't come with anything to make bzImages out of the box.
(b)zImages are x86 specific, AFAIK none of the other platforms Linux supports has zImage. A (b)zImage is needed in x86 because of the memory modell (only 1M adressable of which 640 KB usable in real mode) and the weird boot/partition scheme (come on! A 512 bytes bootsector and partition table in one?)
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
"...it starts to make Linux look more and more attractive with its arguably more polished interfaces.
With Aqua down and not getting up for a while (until Apple can revive it),"...
these two sentences from the introduction make absolutely no sense to me. is he saying that linux has a more polished interface than OS X? what, X? KDE? Gnome? is he joking?
and what is this about aqua being "down"? from what i can tell, aqua is still alive and kicking, considering it's in the released and currently updated product. it's not as if aqua is, say, cyberdog or opendoc, after all...
unfortunately, this is as far as i got in this article, considering his premises are flawed, i can't see how the rest of the review can be any better
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
While I can agree that encoding MP3s on both platforms make for a fair performance test, compiling the kernel doesn't. To start with the architectures are different, one is CISC, the other is RISC, so the machine code geneated is not the same. Compiling to RISC machine code requires a number of compile time optimizations that compiling to CISC machine code doesn't. Another problem with this test is that the motherboards aren't the same so the required support modules will be different.
;)
BTW I couldn't care which is faster since I use both the x86 and the PPC - in separate computers
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
OK, on OS 9 with SoundJam, I can get 160 stereo encodes at around 5.7x on a single 400 MHz G4. I'd love to see how fast the dual 800 they just announced could do it! :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
As with many reviews, they are out of date by the time they hit the shelves. 10.1 has been announce. the performance problems have been fixed. I use YellowDog2 and I thought his review was good, though a little on the rah rah side. YDL is the best distro out there for PPC. Let's see if Mandrake can give them some competition.
photosMy Photostream
The layer you are thinking of is Carbon.
Although OS X isn't god awful slow on my machine, a dual processor g4 500, it's by no means as fast as os 9.1, or even suse running on the same machine.
I've been using MacOS X as my OS since it's release and am presently using version 10.0.4. I'm hoping that within the next few days, apple releases 10.1 with speed increases. MacWorld Expo is happening this week, and hopefully we'll see some new hardware and software.
My decision to use OS X is based on the functionality and productivity I get out of it. On my system the speed is acceptable, but I've seen it running on some slower machines and I don't think I could use it if I didn't have the dual processor machine. I really hope apple increases speed soon.
--
Wow. They should check out GOGO. It's originally based on LAME, with major portions of the code rewritten in assembly for speed. It takes advantage of SMP as well, and my dual PIII-550 can encode an average length song in 15-17 seconds using variable bitrate encoding at 128kbps or 192kbps. Granted, I don't know how well nasm would fair on a Mac (probably not at all), but it's a great tool for x86.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
The benchmarks for the MAC look even better when you take into account that the MAC is being limited by the 4200 rpm laptop hard drive. I'd like to see benchmarks on more similar configurations. Either way the MAC is still to expensive in my opinion, but I am impressed with the performance.
My knowledge of compilers is limited, but I don't think that just because you end up with more, shorter instructions, that the compiler should take longer. In my opinion it doesn't really matter. People using Linux often spend considerable time compiling things on their computers, a comparison of how long it will take you to compile the kernel on each machine is a useful benchmark.
I would thing that there is a lot of Linux software that has been optimized for x86, since it's the dominant platform, so using LAME isn't that unreasonable.
It would be good to include another benchmark, on which the app has been better optimized to use the PPC, but I don't think the choice of benchmarks was that bad.
There is some problems with bencharming two different architecture.
1) When you compile a kernel for ix86 and one for PowerPC, the compiler doesn't not even have the same thing to compile. Same thing for LAME.
2) You're testing also the compiler. It may happen than gcc for powerpc is slower than for ix86.
You would be better to test with applications that do not contains a lot of architecture-specific optimizations (let's say a web server, or even better, a custom application wrote specifically for benchmarking, don't if it exists).
I've use LinuxPPC for three years, and let me say that life (with Linux) on x86 is much more easier.
Also, there is a lot more optimizations for x86, which means that gnome, for example, is as fast on a Pentium 100 than on a PowerPC 604e 180MHz. And some libraries are quite optimized for x86 while being painfully slow on PowerPC (Imlib and Imlib2 are the most outstanding examples). And you always have some programs that have endianess problems. You only have few non-free apps: no Flash, NVIDIA drivers or StarOffice, (although OpenOffice will be a remedy). The last point is nevertheless a mixed bag: you really want free (speech) code, because that's about the only way to get an application to exists on your computer!
Is covering this topic an example of "Yellow Dog Journalism"? :-)
You can get Debian for PPC as well, and it works great. So, don't go got YDL if what you want is apt! IIRC, despite YUP, YellowDog and LinuxPPC are still RPM-based.
A G4 500MHz is not using the MPC7450. It's a MPC7400. Quite a different beast than the 7450, as the 7400 has a 5 stage pipeline, while the 7450 has a 7 stage pipe.
So.. If compiling code is what you do for living maybe you should take the X86 then. It isn't in any way invalid.
If it's going to be a realworld bench that is. For just comparing speed crosscompiling probably are better.
Wow. I'm glad that I wasn't the only one who found this article to be less than good. The one complaint I have that hasn't been posted yet is that the processor he has in the lovely laptop is not an MPC7450 (G4e, 7-stage pipeline, L3 cache), but an MPC7410 (just a G4 7400 on a smaller process).
It's a reference to "yellow journalism", the use of lurid features and sensationalized news in newspaper publishing to attract readers and increase circulation. The phrase was coined in the 1890s to describe the tactics employed in furious competition between two New York City newspapers, the World and the Journal. Read about it here in Encyclopedia Britannica
OS X on it is another matter altogether. It seems inherently slow, whether running applications through the OS 9 compatability mode, running native OS X apps (there are quite a few now), or running no apps at all and just the OS.
My notebook originally came with 128 MB RAM. I upgraded to 384 almost immediately because under OS X it seemed the OS was swapping to disk constantly, with no apps running! OS X easily consumes 128 MB RAM by itself - the price you pay for the Aqua UI, which is incredibly graphics intensive.
Personally, I love Linux on the G4 - now, I'm not a Mac head, I've got an Athlon 1200 here and a bunch of x86 machines. But the G4 Titanium is such a nice little box I couldn't resist picking one up. Price-wise, it was about $100 more expensive than the Dell Inspiron 8000 notebook I was also considering - granted, the Dell was 1 GHz, but again, my G4 seems just as fast. Plus, Linux runs beautifully on it, and the extra-wide screen makes coding a pleasure.
It is also invalid because he is doing make menuconfig and the saving the default .config settings. The problem is, these vary a good bit between PPC and x86, and so the G4 is likely compiling things like ADB support and the PC is probably compiling things like VESA FB support, which both the other platform does not enable by default. So it isn't even different instructions, it's different sources too!
My experience with PPC Linux on a G4 400 was that it compiled many things very quickly, much faster than the PIII 600 sitting next to it. But the true measure would be application performance, such as Apache, gimp, blender, etc.
though I haven't played with OSX-Server, so I can't compare.
Do yourself a favor and avoid it. OS-X server should not have been sold as a "Final" product but as a beta. It crashed frequently, didn't support many devices (very very few!), didn't support SCSI disconnect (read: could not eject tapes from a TBU without crashing), didn't play nice with NFS on non-OS-X clients, and had virtually no software other than the on-board software. The one backup solution was "recalled" due to reliability and copyright issues, and the AppleShare services did not support AppleTalk. Worst of all, you had to pay hundreds of dollars for the piece of junk.
Probably the oddest, part, although, is that you need a 10 MB boot partition. Coming from x86 machines, I didn't see this coming, but with the partition, things worked fine (while they didn't without it).
Uh, how long have you been linux/unix for? AFAIK, this is considered a good idea, whether or not the distro makes you do it. Remember lilo, and your kernel having to be in the first 512meg or so?
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
As my computer architecture lecturer is so fond of pointing out, nobody gives a shit if foo is faster clock-for-clock than bar, they care if bar can scale to a clock speed that renders it faster than foo's top performer.
Having said all of this, I was going to post a link to the PPC BitKeeper pages. They're gone now, with a message that they will be set up elsewhere. Until then, you can find lots of Linux for PPC community resources at http://www.penguinppc.org.
The middle mind speaks!
Sorry for my generialization in the title. But this article is quite far away from being "in-depth". Some quotes: About MOL (Mac-On-Linux, allows you to run MacOS on top of Linux): "This is done sort of like how WINE (on x86 Linux)does things." Wrong! It's more like vmware of win4lin does things. MOL boots MacOs by emulating the traditional MacOS-Hardware and ROMS (and some black-assembly-magick is guess)
"Like I mentioned earlier, I was disappointed with the speed of OS X -- including OS X Server 1.2 (which I'm told is a little faster -- but I couldn't tell much of a difference). I expected the lack of extensive Altivec support on Linux to maybe hold Yellow Dog Linux (as well as other Linuxes) back." He keeps talking about "Altivec" support all of the time (he even says something of "altivec-optimizations" in the kernel). Doesn't he get the e.g. gcc most certainly will _NOT_ use either altivec or ISSE/MMX instructions?
"I decided on doing a make vmlinux because Yellow Dog didn't come with anything to make bzImages out of the box." Oh come on. Please. zImage ist _JUST_ for x86 (due to its stuipid design)
I could go on like this for a while, but I think those examples are enough. This guy just doesn't know what he is talking about
Well, as a Mac fan, I see that AMD truly is the big kid on the block, but you have to admit that having benches like that on a 500mHz chip means that the PPC 74x0 chips really are some bad motherfuckers compared to Intel...
Now if only Motorola can ship some chips that are up to spec.
/Brian
PPC bootloaders suck because up until Open Firmware became the rule, you had to jump through hoops (i.e. kick out MacOS) in order to start something else. You can either hack the firmware (like Darwin/MacOS X does) or you can start up from a stub MacOS Classic partition, but you can't do anything like LILO because the architecture is too different.
Besides, I think pretty much everyone uses one form or another of BootX anyway, at least where they can't reach the firmware xor are too lazy to learn Forth.
/Brian
Which is why the Mac is a generation and a half behind the PC world, even though it utterly destroys a Pentium III at the same speed.
That's what I call bittersweet...
/brian
Ah. See, I have a 6500, which has OF, but it's broken...
But thanks for the clarification. That's roughly what I meant to say in the second paragraph but I never quite got to it.
/Brian
Too bad the Mac's are so expensive, otherwise i would have gotten me one myself.
I really cant figure it though... if you bought a Mac you probably want to run OS X on it anyway. Anyone knows how many users they have ? Growing since OS X or loosing shares ?
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Wow! And you think Apple is in a Tower of Hubris!? Look in the mirror, dude. That was the least informative post I've read in quite some time. Wishing I had moderator's rights just about now.
Motorola engineered AltiVec which makes Photoshop go fast fast fast on a Mac. I make my living off of Photoshop and Illustrator, etc. Therefore, the AltiVec co-processor on the G4 helps me make a living. I love the little bugger! Get off your high horse! Not everyone is a programmer nor is everyone adminsitering some huge piece of iron from IBM. Calm yourself down and get just a touch of perspective!!
---------------------------
Pooty tweet
I've used Linux for about a year on my PowerBook G3, but haven't used it on that machine since OSX was released. Its my primary development machine for an open-source DB-Perl-Web app, which is deployed primarily on x86 Linux servers. Why did I switch? Simply, OSX is a better (much) desktop system than Linux. Yes, OSX has a noticeably more sluggish UI than Linux, but not annoyingly so. More importantly, its more powerfull and better integrated so it allows me to work faster despite being more sluggish. It is far more annoying dealing with X-Windows cut-and-paste, for example, and I do a lot of my typing by cut and paste. For the first time on a UNIX system, I've actually been using the file manager (Finder) to navigate directories rather than the command line (!). Its also nice (very) to plug in an 18" LCD monitor at work for additional (not mirrored) desktop realestate - a feat I couldn't manage in Linux despite much effort. It would be nicer still to have multiple work-spaces in addition to the dual monotors, but I haven't missed them as much as I was sure I would. Also, its very nice (critical in my case) to go on the road and be able to do live demos of a client-server app from a laptop connected to an LCD projector. Other road-related things are much better battery management (8 hours with twin batt. pack), sleep - someting not possible on PowerPC Linux as of 4 months ago, and much simpler management of multiple internet connection methods (dialup, DHCP, static IP, 802.11b - all with just a menu selection or with auto-detection). All that being said, as I mentioned above, the deplyment systems mostly run Linux (on x86). Why? because Linux is a great server platform, that's why - though I haven't played with OSX-Server, so I can't compare.
Pretty thorough review and the guy seems to know his Macs (which I don't particularly).
I was just wondering though if he perceives OS X as slow because there really isn't much native software yet - it all runs through the compatibility layer (forgotten the name).
But Yellow Dog certainly seems to be a lot better than LinuxPPC which I tried to help my friend install and found tricky. But that was a year ago and things have moved on.
I was disturbed that there seem to be a number of installation options you can't change - I think it needs an 'expert mode'.
Well, a lot, really. I thought the article was pretty poorly written.
What they really don't cover, though, is the boot loader. PPC Linux boot loaders traditionally suck, from what I remember of them. To date I haven't heard of one that really "worked" like LILO does. (Though hopefully YDL 2 or Mandrake 8 beta will.)
Not necessarily. The comparison isn't necessarily valid not because one compiles more slowly than the other but because the thing being compiled was not the same piece of software. If, using the same config, you compiled one kernel on an x86 machine and cross-compiled the same kernel for x86 on PPC, then you might start getting closer to a valid comparison. As it is, you may as well compare compiling emacs on x86 to compiling vi on PPC.
I do not have a signature
Wrong. Even granting you your premise:
The first benchmark is valid because it shows how a frequently performed task may be affected by switching architecture.
The second benchmark is valid because users of an uncommon platform cannot expect to find the kind of optimizations for their programs that users of the common platform are used to.
That said, of course two benchmarks don't tell the whole story. For a bigger picture, try this collection of x-platform benchmarks. The stats are collected from many sources, so they're not always based on the same platforms, unfortunately. On the plus side, there's some altivec stuff in there, too.
Kill, Tux, kill!
Actually the binary size is larger too--you can't compile a PPC kernel that will fit on a floppy weithout gzipping it and tacking gunzip onto the front of the code (the infamous zImage.) However this could be due to the different drivers required by the platform as well.
RISC instruction sets in general also expect the compiler to be "smarter" about optimizations. This causes the compiler to take longer.
I would thing that there is a lot of Linux software that has been optimized for x86, since it's the dominant platform, so using LAME isn't that unreasonable.
In general this isn't true; most programmers tend to avoid tying their code to any one architecture, because once you do that it becomes very difficult to port to another chip, and you wind up pissing off the most vocal 10% of Linux users. Any programs which compile out of the box for multiple architectures (in my experience, most of them) won't be particularly optimized for any one. LAME is a special case in that the cross-platform code was written first and then x86 opitmizations were grafted on with #IFDEFs.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
The second test (LAME) is invalid because several important parts of LAME have been hand-optimized in x86 assembler.
Blech.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Moderator: This user's post was a pun, not a troll.
g 20/7.shtml
Check out:
http://www.thedukeofurl.org/reviews/misc/yellowdo
from the review, or more specifically:
http://devel.yellowdoglinux.com/rp_yup.shtml
I certainly preferred this rather than some lamer posting 'Weee 1st post!'.
no, everything is not slower. the only thing thats slower is the gui. and as jobs showed today, thats being fixed and will ship in sept
informal tests of apache show it to be faster on os x than linux, hopefully /. will post these tests when theyre complete. log in as >console and see for yourself
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
I am not doing it because Apple isn't providing me with something stable or fast enough.
I am not doing it because the OS doesn't provide enough features.
I am not doing it because Linux is superior to OS X.
Quite frankly, although these are arguably untrue today, once the tranistion is completed, and OS X becomes the dominant and leading consumer *nix distro, its superiority will be unquestioned.
This article is a perfect example of the Linux/OS X cold-war taking place. Although the two have many things in common, and enjoy mutual benefits from the other's existance, there are many in the Linux community who are threatened by and fear OS X. Even Mr. Torvalds fired a shot, stating that OS X makes ALL the design flaws one could make, AND invented some of its own. (I'm fully aware that it was probably directed at the micro-kernel, but what was said was said).
Who can blame the Linux community for feeling animosity towards OS X? Much of the Linux community has spent the later part of the 90's trying to convince their friends to take MS off their desktops in favor of a "free" (free as in most people could care less) *nix OS.
All of a sudden, a company develops a *nix distro destined to be more beautiful and more usable than any other, with the goal of making it the world's most advanced OS and finally bringing *nix to the users -- within ONE year. Where Linux has failed, Mac OS X will succeed.
To add insult to injury -- this company is Apple. A company that many curse as a cancer on the computer world. A company whose user base is considered to be sub-human by ungrateful Linux and Windows users who lash out at Apple while using their Macintosh-derivative computers and USB peripherals. It seems that the author of the article is one of these people. If he was really the Mac user he claimed to be, he wouldn't have used the same weak arguments against OS X that won't mean anything in September.
Although I say this, I am not so preoccupied with this cold-war to not use Linux as a tool when needed. Particularly, I am installing it to learn it and to play Counter-Strike.
Those who are trying to promote Linux on Macs are going to shoot themselves in the foot by attacking OS X. The best way to promote it is to target the older Macs, those who want free (beer) software, those who want to learn, and those who want games like Half-Life.
That's http://www.arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc- 1.html for the Goat-phobic.
- Dan I.
The Green Ostrich for VAX and Pink Shoe for Spectrum Linux distributions should be made available soon.
Microsoft's Blue Screen distribution is expected for later this year.
-- B.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
But ofcourse it does, its linux isnt it?
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
One thing that really bothers me is that i can't just download a new kernel and compile it. With every try i have i get disapointet by getting some sort of error. On my pentium machine i just compile the new kernels (i like running new kernels). But here i just run the suplied kernel.
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
Thanks for the review. Anyone who produces information is a good thing...
I think it should be pointed out wherever possible that Motorola Bastardizes the PPC, and that IBM's Power III and upcoming Power IV are the salvation of PPC. Apple is an tower of hubris, they lost market share and are 15% owned by Gill Bates because of one thing: overpriced garbage.
We must look to IBM to provide us with decent PPC hardware! The PPC is a thing of raw power and beauty, and it really does shine on IBM's power workstations and whatnot. With the Intellificastion of the Alpha [(I know someone on the Alpha design team - here is the scoop, Intel can use Alpha MA, EV7 will be finished at Compaq - Compaq will offer 4 to 256 CPU based servers, the EV8 design team will work for Intel in one year, Intel believes VLIW/Merced/McKinley was a mistake and will charge the EV8 design team to come up with a new CPU with the only requisite: it must be IA-64 compatible)], and the deathly low margins of Athlon CPUs, we really need PPC to stop being bastardized by Motorola. Screw Apple and Motorola.
For the record, OS X is the most useless thing I have ever seen creep out of Apple. I am an ardent fan of BeOS, and Apple would have done much better to have embraced BeOS, offered Intel based "IMACS" for the cheap stuff, and hardcore POWER-3 powered high BeOS Macs.
The error that they made will live in the annuls of history at this point.
I call upon the PPC community to dethrone that pompous ass referred to as Steve Slobs and his vile Microsoft's bitch company, Crapple.
By the way, Intel may not be as badass, but its CHEEP.
PS. CON TE PARTIRO, Crapple CUBE.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Most of the information was provided in the article, that being that PPC is slower.
Why would such hardware command a premium. I'm not here to engage in warfare, I'm just dying for a way out of the Intel gammit, and Apple isn't paving a golden path. Of all the zealotry in the world, the worst is this AltiVec. Its almost meaningless, I went to all sorts of sites, and the advantages of AltiVec are that is some doofy name to put on a box and market. Its constantly pointed to and said, there it be, the goldne ALTIVEC. Yet it fails to produce much interest. Maybe I have a myopic approach to looking for information, and I want Apple to fail Thats what you think. I happen to have exposure quite frequently to "new" MACS, they are boring and overpriced machines.
You have not convinced me you have tried the alternatives. You have not. You stick by what you know and thats fair. I feel confident in saying that I know what I have tried, this ranges from commercial Unixes, BSDs, Linux, MAC OS/OS X, and the Microsoft junk. After the novelty of "the color computer!" wore off, Apple has in my estimation failed to trailblaze much of anything for our industry. And if Motorola was so great, why did Apple and Motorola have some of the bloodiest corporate fights?
This is just an opinion, and CIO's agree with me, Apple certainly isn't the lesser of two evils. Market share goes to show that.
Apple users make it out like they have some uber workstation, like having and Indy 5 years ago, and there is all this power they have no one else does.
Trust me, Power-III CPU based workstations start at $20,000 for a reason, superior architechture is at the top of the list.
What is with all your emphasis!! In your! Post! You seem to have quite a bit of emotion attached to this discussion, which leads me to believe you make emotional conclusions and not those based on fact or experience.
You would mod me down because I have said what you did not want to hear, not that my arguments were flat out wrong or flaming or trolling.
You would mod me down because I have rendered an opinion with which you disagree. This is a sad revelation to make to our community about your nature - censorial.
Now, as far as getting a perspective, you product something a little more convincing that "AlitVec rules!! I know! I use Photoshop ALL DAY MAN!
Prove me wrong, show me some web site that says, yes, here is a barrage of valid cross platform cross operating systems tests that shows without a doubt that PPC kicks the crap out of any Intel CPU.
I have searched for such evidence and have found none. Only Apple's heavily disclaimed* ** *** claims on thier website say such things.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Since Yellow Dog is so new, security is obviously very good.
This is not obvious. Furthermore the security of an OS is not causally related to age of the release.
Note to all IT professionals: Security through obscurity NEVER WORKS.
Yellow Dog Linux 2.0 is by far the best distribution I have used that actually "works" and is the easiest to install yet. I have tried LinuxPPC 2000 Q4, Mandrake and Debian. All of them suck in one way or the other (well ... LinuxPPC is probably the closest after YDL).
YDL 2.0 on the other hand installs like a charm. Of course, there is still a lot of room for improvement, but given the state of other installers, I think YDL is the best so far.
I am using YDL 2.0 with a 2.4 SMP kernel on my dual G4 450MHz PowerMac. It blows Mac OS X right out of the water. KDE looks awesome and it runs all my favourite games using SNES and MAME.
My only gripe is that I am stuck with a 1280x1024 resolution (I have a Apple Studio 17" monitor) and YDL will stubbornly refuse to let me set 1024x768 ... but hey ... who cares. KDE looks great at 1280x1024 with anti-aliased truetype fonts. Konqueror is awesome and is FAST on PPC. I even have accelerated X server support for the Rage 128 video card!
Since I started using YDL 2.0 on my PowerMac, I have virtually forgotten my x86 installation of Linux ... All I will ever need runs great on the PPC and much faster at that. This really makes me think how much the x86 architecture sucks ...
YDL 2.0 rocks!