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Yellow Dog Linux 2.1 Shipping
Durindana indicates this announcement of the newest version of Yellow Dog Linux, writing: "PowerPC fans, this is a big deal. YDL's certainly improved over its former state lately; hopefully 2.1 continues that trend. Does this make it the "best of class" (Mandrake's favorite term) for PPC?" There are at least four strong Linux-on-Mac contenders now, which is nice to see.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Even as a hardcore Mac user (start up the flamethrowers), I have always been sympathetic to the open source cause and been interested in the dev. of Linux. However, without and old PC to muck around with, I'd never had the chance to try it out for myself. Along comes YLD, and now I'm able to install Linux on my old Power Computing (apple clone) machine. There were a few hiccups, but due to all the great Linux resources on the web, I figured them out and now I have my very own Linux box! Anyway, YDL gives mac users that WANT to get more techincal a chance to and provides the Linux community with good exposure, and that's always a good thing!!!
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
I am not a PPC user, but I am a Linux user. I find it intersting that they are going with ext3 (as is RH). It will be interesting to see which journaling file systems the different distrobutions go with. Perhaps by years end, one or two of them will be dominant. Does OS X have journaling?
How does YD compare to SuSE's PPC offerings? Looks like SuSE has put together a pretty nice PPC distro too:
d ex.html
http://www.suse.com/us/products/suse_linux/ppc/in
On a side note, I finally tried out Mandrake 8.1 x86. That is an AWESOME graphical install!!! Almost as nice as installing Mac OS X.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
NetBSD is great for a lot of platforms; it's running right now on my alpha, decstation, and i386. But for macppc it's just not there compared to linux. The documentation is even worse than with other major netbsd platforms (netbsd documentation is pretty bad/outdated). It _still_ comes with XFree 3.3.x (yes version 4 is in the package system), so no easy accelerated video if you've got a Radeon. Plus to boot it you have to muck around in OF trying to figure out the right settings (which if you have a machine built after 1996 aren't included in the install docs), compared to Yellow Dog's hacky-but-easy-to-use booter.
Now, I prefer netbsd to anything else (except OS X on my mac) but it needs a lot of work on macppc (mainly documentation-wise). I just wish I were up to the challenge.
Because not all of us can use OS X. And don't get me wrong, I'm talking about an iMac DV 400 and a PB G3, both with OS X 10.0.4 and 192MB of RAM. I'm one o' those lucky ones who 'supported' OS X early on, and now can't get an upgrade to a USEABLE version without either 1) sending Apple $20 and waitin' for the mail, or 2) driving 100 miles, over a mountain pass, to the nearest CompUSA. Can't just wander down to the authorized dealer (Connecting Point) from whom I purchased my copy. Why exactly did Apple put those coupons in the box? What are they for, if not this? So Apple has lost at least two software purchases (another 10.1 OEM for the PB, and AppleWorks 6), and possibly a hardware sale (my mom is thinking about a notebook, and she already has a Dell desktop...) because I cannot upgrade from 10.0.4 easily. So I shall stay with 9.1 for the time being, and take a look at Linux for PPC. I already have SuSE on my PC.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
Honsetly OS X hasn't got that much going for it.
Yellog Dog is trying to market to existing Macintosh users. Those users are accustomed to Apple's ease of use. I tried Yellow Dog, and it was not nearly the equal of the latest x86 (RedHat or Mandrake) installers. I can't imagine that they will persuade many mac users to switch.
I disagree with this pretty strongly. Linux PPC runs on essentially any Apple PCI PowerPC machine ever made. MacOS X runs only on recent G3 and G4 models. It doesn't even fully support the DVD decoding hardware in older G3 laptops. It doesn't support the original PowerBook G3 at allApple's new OS doesn't support hardware they were shipping only 18 months ago. Now that's service with a smile! (Reference: System Requirements for MacOS X 10.1)
XFree86 is accelerated for Mach 64, Rage 128, and Radeon which covers all the Macs I care about. 2d drawing, video scaling, colorspace conversion, and 3d OpenGL are all supported. Sound works on everything that OS X supports except the newest iBook.
YDL is the worst Linux PPC distribution you can buy. Get Debian/PPC and install a BenH kernel which supports power management on PowerBooks (and iMacs, Cubes, etc.) Linux powers off my PCMCIA cards when the PowerBook sleeps, where MacOS X does not. If I put my PowerBook to sleep under MacOS X 10.1, my battery will be drained by morning. With Linux it sleeps as long as MacOS 9 does.
Well that's great for the iBook, but on the PowerBook neither the TV nor the external monitor can play movies, and you also can't play movies on the LCD with a TV or monitor attached. Linux does this just fine. I use VideoLAN which has Altivec acceleration, and incidentally also has an embryonic MacOS X port. Read the Apple Technical Note 60895 "DVD Player 3.0 Does Not Work With External Monitor Connected to PowerBook"
Hear me now or hear me later: OS X is *loaded* with local root exploits. Here's one article.
How about support for hardware I just bought a few months ago? Oh wait, that might cut into Steve's personal slush fund.
Except they run better under Classic than MOL because Apple spent a lot of time optimizing.
:)
People have done performance tests. In the general case, Classic and MoL perform about equally well.
Further, Classic apps share the desktop with other apps. You don't need to house the MacOS desktop inside a giant X window.
I rather prefer it. I happen to think that's what that relic of an OS deserves.
Maybe so, I wouldn't know. But in general, OS X supports a lot more Apple hardware than Linux. For example, XFree86 4.1 is still unaccelerated for a lot of video cards in Apple systems,
Anything Rage128 or Radeon-based does 2D accel, and 3D accel is in the works (works on some, not on others - mostly with Rage128s). nVidia isn't very well supported because of their binary drivers. We can't do anything about that.
Firewire device support in Linux is flaky,
FireWire support is still under heavy development, and that doesn't work for me at present.
and sound doesn't work under Linux in many systems (particularly laptops).
Sound support for DACA (on the clamshell iBooks) and Texas/Tumbler (on iBook2), as well as Screamer (on the TiG4) is supported. I don't know about sound support for the Pismo, Lombard and Wallstreet, though. Haven't run Linux on any of them.
BS. I've got an iBook with YDL 2.0 and it doesn't even support suspend/sleep mode, nor does it dim the display. It can spin down the disk and blank the display, but that's it.
I sleep my iBook FireWire ALL THE TIME. It works great. You need a recent kernel, that's all. Display blanking in X doesn't work yet, but I head that's supposed to work by XFree 4.2.0.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Like what? Are you going to provide any examples, or are you just making stuff up?
Check bugtraq from either yesterday or the day before.
Two point-and-click root exploits where described there. That's right, point and click. That means no code hacking, no buffer overflows, simply click the right icons in the right order and you have root. So simple my mother could do it.