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Yellow Dog Linux 2.0 review
lotion writes "MaximumLinux.org has posted it's take of Yellow Dog Linux 2.0 on a PowerBook G4: "My distribution of choice was Yellow Dog Linux from Terra Soft Solutions. Adam and I had the opportunity to speak a bit with the co-founder and CEO Kai Staats of Terra Soft Solutions at the MacWorld Expo in NYC last month and I must say I was impressed. Not only was I impressed with there 2.0 release but there new hardware that they had rolled out that day as well.""
I've used MkLinux, LinuxPPC and YDL on my Power Mac 6500, and YDL has given me the easiest install (even though the disc isn't bootable for Old World machines) and it flies - no problems with X, no problems updating, no problems switching back and forth fron KDE to Gnome and back. Terra Soft is proving itself to be a major thinker in the Linux world, and hopefully that will follow with some more revenue for not only YDL, but also Black Lab Linux (embedded systems) and their briQ hardware. This is a killer distro.
OK, I like linux. It's not the best choice for everything, but I see this article as further proof that Linux has become an even more viable OS option for users. The way I see it, any successful piece of software needs four things: Desired functionality, Availability/Accessibility, Platform acceptance & availability, and last but not least, Usability.
/. readers!</RANT>
Can you guess which one Linux is still lacking in???
We're almost there. Linux can do anything Windows can do (and mostly better). You can now buy Linux off any computer store shelf, at bookstores, online, or even download it for free. Now, as the article shows, Linux runs smoothly on dozens of different hardware platforms, and GNU software runs on dozens of OS's, including Apple's. Now, if only it were easier to configure a damn mouse!!!!
<RANT>I propose a petition to the IETF that the surrounding tags become official identification for
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
I'm a big linux fan & all, but honestly, OS X's only drawback right now is speed, and that's getting fixed up in next month's release. Run all the X apps you want (thanks to the darwin ports collection!), and all the mac apps you want, side by side. I mean, assuming 10.1 does a decent job at speed (let's say easily usable but not 1:1 with LinuxPPC), what reasons would one have to stick with linuxppc? (not trolling, honestly curious).
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How far KDE has come. KDE is really impressive nowadays (2.1). I'm amazed that the linux companies hasn't dared to say yet that Linux is ready for the desktop.
I'm almost inclined to agree. KDE itself is an absolutely great desktop. For me, the only thing that I think Linux needs is a consistent way to install programs. RPM's are great, Debian files are great, but there are still quite a few unpackaged programs that are distributed as tar.gz's. When we have a packaging system which can install any of them, and remember them in the same way so that they can be easily uninstalled, and which can figure out dependicies between the different systems, I will consider Linux ready for the desktop period.
I should like to say I am actually grateful that companies haven't said that Linux is ready for the desktop yet - by premature announcement of the fact, they leave Linux wide open to criticism for claims that it cannot (quite yet) forfill. I'd rather that things are got just right, and then big announcements made.
Just my $0.02
LOL! PDF-based rendering doesn't mean it creates a PDF and processes it to draw something, it means it uses the same imaging model as PDF.
Actually, it's almost identical to Postscript, but with Quartz they lose the programmability of PS and the licensing fees (fortunately). They gain "PostScript-like drawing features such as resolution independence, transformable coordinates (for rotation, scales, and skews), Bézier paths, and clipping operations." This gives them a unified model for printing and drawing. And it makes it easy to generate a PDF file, or to render a PDF file (printer spool files are PDF files). But how do you explain this to Joe user? Saying it uses the PDF model for rendering and describing image environments turns to "it uses PDF to draw."
For example, if they said it was OpenGL based, the reaility might be that it uses the same multi-stage rendering pipeline as OpenGL, in that you have data to draw represented by vertices, they get transformed by the model-view matrix, and then transformed by the camera, then clipped to the viewable area, then perspective is applied (3D to 2D), then drawn. But that doesn't mean that it is creating a new OpenGL context and running OpenGL commands every time it draws something.
There's also a misconception that Adobe worked on Quartz. They had nothing to do with it.
So why is it slow? Because OS X 10.0 is just ass-slow. At *everything*. I've got one of them high-end G4s. When I was at the expo and they were showing how fast 10.1 is, I heard some people in the audience say "yeah, but how fast is the machine that it's running on?" Pfft! It looked twice as fast as my machine, and before the expo they didn't come any faster :)
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
OK so you take a terrific machine (Ti PB) and a terrific operating system (OS X) and you toss out the OS and put Linux on it? Why??? OS X is a posix system that runs much of the same software as Linux does, plus it has a GUI that, unlike Gnome and KDE, is extremely well designed and doesn't look like Windows. I can think of no decent reason to replace something as incredible as OS X with something as rum-dum as Linux on a machine like this. Doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Not in the least bit practical. One common argument for Linux on Wintel hardware is that Wintel hardware is cheaper. Thus I can see the modivation. But to replace OS X with Linux on expensive Apple hardware defies logic completely. Linux has it's place. But not on a Ti PB. Sorry.