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Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 - Finally in Limited Release
sloopy writes "Terra Soft Solutions has released the long awaited and overdue next version of Yellow Dog Linux - version 4.0, for ydl.net enhanced subscribers and pre-installed on new machines, with full release to hopefully soon follow in the coming weeks. With this new release, they finally include native support for the new G5s (32-bit kernel/toolchain currently, full 64-bit soon) and continued support for the G4s and newer G3s."
too bad it wont run on my 17 inch gen 1 powerbook :(
The unfortunate thing is that YDL has dropped support for the oldworld rom architecture. So now your beige g3's and the wallstreet powerbooks and earlier are no longer officially supported.
I haven't tried YDL yet, but I'm dualbooting my ibook with gentoo and OSX so there should be no problem.
And of course there is Mac on Linux which let's you run OSX at allmost native speed while working in linux.
Question: Can you dual boot it though?
Sure, you can. The boot loader on ppc linux is 'yaboot' and handles that fine.
blah
Yes, you can dual-boot. Furthermore, with mac-on-linux, you can run your OSX installation in a window on linux. Not emulation, either...it just boots the os native.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
I don't read replies by ACs.
The biggest problem with OS X is its great for the high-end G4s (like my 1.5GHz Powerbook) and the G5s, but they pushed it onto to the lower end machines too much. My only first-hand use experience with OS X has been on there, so I've only used a nice quick version as opposed to slow laggy performance of the iBooks. I can play the UT2004 Demo great in full res on my Powerbook (with the mobility 9700 and 128mb vram), but good luck on any Apple machine much lower than that.
I run YellowDog on my iBook for the same reasons as you do, and the only downside is that the silly modem doesn't work, making it necessary to boot into OS X when travelling without an ethernet or wireless connection to the Internet. Other than that, though, it's been mostly YellowDog, because I'm way more familiar with Linux.
As an aside, I wanted to point you toward a virtual desktop pager for OSX that I've been using and really like:
http://wsmanager.sourceforge.net/index.php
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
MS no longer owns a "significant chunk" of Apple, they sold (at least most) of their stock years ago when the value went back up.
As for inflated hardware price - if you want PPC nicely packaged, Apple is the only game in town. If you don't then don't worry about it.
That is false. M$ had invested $150 million (which is not that much) on non-voting Apple stock in 1997, but has long sold it (and made a hefty profit)
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
10.1 and 10.2 where kinda slow on my iBook 500. 10.3 has a lot of optimizations for G3 chips, and runs very nicely. I did upgrade to a 5400 RPM 40 gig drive though.
:( Myth II runs fine :) I got all the way through NOLF I on it!
Forget about playing any recent games on an 8 MB graphics card tho'
Hey smart guy...
1)OSX is not fully 64-bit either.
2)YDL created yum (Yellowdog Package Manager) that handles dependencies automatically.
3)There are lots of reasons folks might want to use Linux instead of OSX. Check around this story for lots of them. In my case, I just like KDE's interface a hell of a lot more than OSX's "real purty, but not at all utilitarian" approach.
4)If that wasn't meant as a flame, you need to work on your posting.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
IBM has an article on Yellow Dog on PowerMacs. I personally can't see running anything but Mac OS X on a PowerMac, but to each his own.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
The biggest and best reason that I am familiar with is this: Linux does not make as many demands on the computers as OS X, and is more stable than OS 9. I have an old 233 Mhz Red A iMac that was at the end of its rope. I was about to turn it into an aquarium when I learned of YDL. Now I have a functioning computer that allows me to continue using my computer that I purchased in 1998. It certainly is no racehorse, but it can browse the web and check email, has Open Office, and all of the usual trimmings that come with a Redhat distro (YDL is based on Redhat). There was a reason that Apple jumped head-first into OS X...OS 9 was near useless. It was the same software for years with bandaid on top of bandaid. Imagine if you were still using Win95 with some prettier graphics and a few added features that made it crash a little more often. OS X solves all that. But on my prehistoric iMac OS X is a pipe dream. It will never happen. Linux is a nice compromise.
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
If OS X can run most/all linux apps via X11
This isn't as easy as it sounds- you can't just install Linux apps on OS X. If you are lucky you can recompile them making minimal changes and have it work. Tools like Fink help out a lot- I guess I'd compare it to a graphical apt-get for OS X even though I'm sure that isn't entirely accurate.
And then what should he do with the existing iMac, ,throw it away? He still should put Linux on it (YDL or some other distro). The point was made in an earlier post that running Linux on PPC hardware gives the user a consistent operating/user environment across platform architectures. While one could install Fink, there are still differences in the development environment that delays porting from a regular GNU/Linux environment to the BSD/OSX environment. YDL essentially is Fedora Core (1?) on PPC, so going back and forth from an Intel-based machine is relatively painless.
The list price was $999 which means you have gotten core computer usage for ~$200 a year, or less than $0.55 a day. Perhaps it is time to upgrade to a system that DOES run OS X.
FWIW, if you put at least 256mb of memory in it, you can usably run OS X on a 350. I have it running quite surprisingly well with Panther on an iMac/333, which is even worse, with 512mb of RAM. It's obviously not good for having lots of apps open or for number crunching or whatever, but it's a very good machine for browsing the 'net or email and things of that nature - which was one of the major selling points for the iMacs initially anyways.
I may be mistaken, but WINE works only on x86 platforms; it's not an emulator, but rather a set of compatibility libraries. In order to run a Windows application on OS X, the machine code (which is x86) has to be converted to PPC instructions - a task that Virtual PC 6 handles well (but with some tradeoffs involved)
A few things.
First of all Fink uses apt-get as part of its package management. Fink is basically a Mac OS X-enhanced version of apt-get with some other good features added in.
Secondly, Fink is not graphical at all, it is completely command-line. There is, however, a 3rd-party graphical front end to Fink called FinkCommander.
Sapere aude!
For instance, I'm very comfortable with virtual desktops in Gnome 2.6 and miss them terribly when I'm on a Windows
Well miss them no longer! From the Microsoft XP Power Toys Website you can download DeskMan which wil give you 4 virtual desktops and a cool composite screen not even available on Linux (AFAIK). Just install it, right click on the toolbar in the context menu Toolbars->Desktop Manager and there you go. Different backgrounds for each and key bindings too! All from your friends at Microsoft so that I don't think it qualifies as a "hack". (also I found some really cool PowerToys for my TabletPC).
I'm not saying this to apologise for Windows but for those who want their virtual desktops.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Now if only we can get AirPort Extreme Card drivers, we'll be all set.
I'm not well informed on the issue, but I've heard it has something to do with the chipset manufacturer not releasing any specs or drivers for the product in question.
I haven't seen much third party reverse engineering to create a driver for this card; perhaps because of fear of DMCA stuff.
http://pixelcort.com/
Pismos have the 100mhz bus going in their favor... they also have two megs of CPU cache, whereas the iBooks have much, MUCH less. :)
Check out the free Desktop Manager for all your virtual desktop needs. It uses undocumented Apple APIs, so it's very fast and looks great!
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
The reason why I wouldn't ditch OS X is because of Mathematica, which AFAIK does not run on PowerPC Linux of any flavour Yellow Dog included.
Hey, to anyone who wants to run Mac-only applications on top of YDL (or probably any Linux distro running on a PPC processor) you might want to know about Mac-on-Linux. Apparently it's capable of running pretty much any version of the Mac OS from System 7.5.2 to OS X 10.3.x, at near native speeds. I've never had the chance to try it myself but it looks pretty interesting. The site says it's not an emulator, which is why it's fairly fast. Check out the multi-session support too. You can run 2-3 different versions of Mac OS at the same time. Probably more, only limited by memory and cpu speed.
I don't know about Yellow Dog, but the Red Hat installation program flashes trivia by occasionally to keep you busy, and it provides a few insights. First of all, Wikipedia says this: "Red Hat's name came from the manual of the beta version, which contained a request for the return of Marc Ewing's characteristic red and white-striped hat, should anyone find it." The installer trivia says, if I remember correctly, that when Ewing was in college people would often ask for "the guy in the red hat" for computer help. So he came to be associated with the hat.
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