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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."
- 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.
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.
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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.
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 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.
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
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'.
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
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!
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.
I wouldn't go that far. It's nice to see the Mac community getting a Linux they deserve, rather that some of the second-hand ports which have been available. Buy a Mac though? No thanks - I'll stick with my Athlon for the moment. If only, as you mention, for the cost, and the (lame) fact that I'm used to having a PC on my desk.
cmclean
"Any similarity between the hooting of a million eager monkeys and Slashdot is purely coincidental." -THEFLASHMAN
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.
Too bad the Mac's are so expensive
On the desktop, sure, where you have to compare them to the frankenstein boxes that all us geeks love to build from parts.. but one of those new iBooks would be a fine, fine Linux laptop, if they could just get the audio working. But it's being worked on..
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!