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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."
I work at a school district where we have many (hundreds) of beige Apple G3 All-in-one computers. They can run OSX but not very well. Right now we have a lab set up running Yellow Dog 3. Sure, they take a long time to boot but once they are up and running you have a stable platform that is running the latest software.
For the most part mac hardware is good.. but some of the hardware is far from open..
:-P
eg
1) nvidia chipset on the 12" pb
1) broadcom on the airport extreme card
Other than that I love my gentoo powerbook
I have "brought back to life" a fairly useless 6100 series PowerPC via Yellow Dog. I use it at work as an "everything" server (I know you have a machine like this too!): file server, internal webserver, mailing list server, and probably a dozen other things as I need them. Basically, its performance has been excellent, and it has been running for months at a time without any problems.
What surprised me was how solid the old powerPC macs were in terms of hardware. The old Apple os9 crashed so much, I could not beleive it was ALL software. I thought, it must be poorly written OS code plus some sloppy RAM/processor/Drive bus engineering! But lo and behold, with YDLinux on the machine, it is as stable as granite.
Um, does it work on my Aluminium 17" yet? Last time I tried linux, the video support was horrible.
Also, if I can't do dual display, I'm not running it.
You do realize that all modern X86s use a RISC-like core, and the PPC architecture has so many bells and whistles that it barely qualifies as RISC at all? The X86 instruction code translation layer adds overhead, but this overhead has remained constant as overall CPU gate count has increased exponentially. It is no longer a major factor.
Power levels are largely determined by silicon process details, cache size and marketing-driven architecture decisions such as cranking GHz at the expense of IPC (which are all orthogonal to which particular instruction set is presented to the programmer).
I agree that RPM itself isn't to blame, but the dependency issues and how their handled is. 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.
For a long time I sounded exactly like you, impatient with people complaining about a problem I thought long in the past (like Linux sound support or graphics chipset drivers). But I was using Mandrake, the other RPM based distro. With Mandrake (using urpmi) dependency issues really where a snap (adding THAC and PLF repositories you have just about everything you can imagine). Fedora choked on its own updates, adding additional repositories was even worse, but after failing to meet the dependencies of its own updates I quickly wiped it off my hard drive.
Quack, quack.
If you program it in raw machine code with a hex editor, you would get annoyed at it. Have you ever tried to read straight hex when an instruction can be anywhere from one to like 13 bytes long?! Well, neither have I, of course. IMHO, the biggest difference is not in the actual instruction set, but in things like the PC BIOS. I much prefer Open Firmware to a PC BIOS. Also, Macs tend to support strange things like booting from firewire much better than PC's of similar vintage. Power consumption isn't directly related to the instruction set, but I can't find anybody locally with cheap VIA C3 boxes, so all my x86 hardware is noisy hot, and power consuming, which annoys me. IRQ conflicts don't seem to exist on the Mac. They have mostly gone away in modern times on the PC, but they haven't gone away completely. Again, that isn't the instruction set specifically, but I'm only aware of one company that ever built a modern X86 box that wasn't a PC. AGI made some Slot one systems which didn't use a PC BIOS, and so needed a special HAL in Windows NT4. Well, also the X-box. So, two companies. But still, the vast majority of X86 hardware has a PC-BIOS, and an Intel or AMD Processor...
It's not hard (in certain parts of the country, anyhow) to find PIIIs being tossed out / nearly free, but I'd like to find a free / cheap G3 system. Where do you see them being thrown out? (Serious question.) My iBook is a G3, and I'm quite happy with it, at least as happy as I could reasonably expect from a 4.5 year old machine ... I would not mind a G3 desktop running Linux.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I see a lot of people say RPM sucks, but rarely do they post an explanation. I started on Slackware in '93/'94 and moved to Redhat in '95/'96 and loved RPM. I used and loved RPM for quite sometime before moving on to Gentoo a couple of years ago. But I still like the RPM system. In all the years I used it, I never had any major complaints. *shrugs*
Thank you. Drive through. (:wq)