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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
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?
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.
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'.
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.