Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 Reviewed

eobanb writes "I finally wrote a somewhat in-depth review of Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux 4.0. It's basically a PowerPC port of Fedora Core 2. The good? Pretty modern software, and setup is a snap. The bad? RPM sucks as always, and there are a few too many things that are broken out of the box. Linux PPC; it's a niche-within-a-niche, as I heard one Slashdot comment call it, but it may well be worthwhile if you're annoyed by x86 hardware."

Comments

Re:Or....

[Jonathan]

Just out of curiosity, why would you be annoyed at x86 hardware?

Well, X86 hardware tends to be loud (yes, I know you can buy special quiet liquid cooled systems, but the typical x86 box is as loud as an air conditioner). Macs (with few exceptions) are whisper quiet

Sigh

[bogie]

"RPM sucks as always"

Actually no it doesn't. In of itself there is nothing wrong with it as a file packaging format. Plus for resolving dependances there is yum and apt-get for rpm. If RPM did indeed "suck" by all reasonable standards I don't think you'd see Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, and the Linux Standards Base using it.

Re:Sigh

[Stevyn]

Just keep in mind how many people are willing to waste their computer's time compiling as to not waste their time hunting down dependencies. Even those nice RPM package managers will make a mistake. And what about Mandrake users who are stuck with a package that's a year old?

Again, people use portage because it actually makes installing up to date software easier. The 2% speed increase usually isn't a factor though, so you're reference to funrool loops, while funny, isn't an accurate portrayal of gentoo users.

Re:Or....

[eobanb]

Plenty of reasons. My friend's Dell is much thicker, louder, sucks more power, and has a shorter battery life. The only thing it beats my Powerbook in is screen resolution.

Quit Complaining About RPM

[texroot]

Apparently this has to be repeated continually for some people to get it:

Yum and Apt4RPM are to Apt as RPM is to dpkg.

All the "RPM sucks" comments are stupid. RPM does fine at what it is made for, as does dpkg. RPM does not manage dependancies, that's why Yum, Apt4RPM and the like were developed.

Now one can compare Yum, for example, to Apt, and that is an apples to apples comparison. Such tools are available to do the same things as Apt, and while the quality of the tools and repositories aren't as mature as those for Apt they're improving rapidly.

But it's just ignorant to complain about RPM and compare it to Apt or Portage.

Re:Quit Complaining About RPM

[texroot]

The point about the repository being limited is valid and informative. But it has nothing to do with RPM.

It's like saying "hardcover books suck" because you went to a library that had only hardcover books and the selection was limited. Then you go to a second library that has only softcover books but carries a good selection. So you say "softcover books rock". It's not the way it's packaged, it's the selection, as you note above.

On the other hand commenting about the repositories available for rpm via Yum and similar programs compared to those available for apt is valid to discuss. There are lots of RPM packages, dependancy issues that still exist have nothing to do with RPM (the way they're packaged) and everything to do with the repositories.

I think that you understand the issue but saying it in the way you did just perpetuates the confusion that seems to still exist about this.

Re:Or....

[kronchev]

Are you joking? You have to be joking. I pray you're joking. Normal PCs are as quiet as Macs, if youve only used systems set up by idiots, then thats what you'll get, an idiot's system.

Keep in mind....

[Oliver Aaltonen]

PPC != Apple alone. While few Apple owners have switched from OS X to Linux, Linux is extremely popular with the other big PPC vendor: IBM. A majority of IBM's servers are PPC architecture. As it is, IBM has an entire division devoted to Linux on POWER. Also, there are quite a few other distributions that run on the PPC architecture (ie: RedHat, SuSE), and the platform seems to be gaining more and more popularity. So much for this being a "niche-within-a-niche".

Re:Or....

[SmittyTheBold]

If you get good fans, you can have a quite PC. What happens is people get the cheapest possible fans, or one that goes totally overkill, with no regard to noise output.

The loudest fan in my PC is on the video card; even that I could replace and make much more quiet.

Re:Aluminium 17"

[dasunt]

Um, does it work on my Aluminium 17" yet? Last time I tried linux, the video support was horrible.

There is probably going to be a comment out there that will tell you exactly what you need to do to get linux running perfectly on your powerbook.

This is not that post.

This is the post that asks "why?" Googling, I see more than a few sites that suggests linux runs fine on Aluminum powerbooks. Yet your question suggests it doesn't. (Your question is a pretty poor question, btw -- next time tell us more information about the laptop, when you last tried it, and what distro + version you tried.)

Linux, for all the spiffy easier-to-use distros (Mandrake, Redhat, etc) tends to benefit from a little tweaking and the user experience benefits a lot from more than a little reading. You don't sound like the person who wants to do either. So why not stick with MacOS X? Its a decent system for a lot of tasks, and you can get many open source applications by using fink.

Re:Your wrong...

[jcostom]

Yum is no better then the package managers that build the RPM's and my experience with Red Hat/Fedora is that dependency issues are still very much a thing of the present.

How's that? Yum handles dependencies just fine.

If I try to install say, the php-mysql package, but don't have the php package already installed, Yum notices that and says (effectively), "Hey, you also need these packages to make this work, I'm going to get them too, ok?"