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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."
...more likely if you already have a Mac lying around. Just out of curiosity, why would you be annoyed at 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.
Kernel threads almost universally stay on the cpu they were originally assigned to. High performance threaded subsystems, such as the network stack, are replicated. That is, the network stack creates multiple threads (one per cpu) and those threads do not migrate because, obviously, they do not need to.
Generally speaking, the purpose of making thread migration explicit instead of automatic is to partition a larger data set across available cpu caches rather then cause the same data to be shared amoungst all cpu caches. The processors operate a lot more efficiently and SMP scales a lot better. Most people do not realize the horrendous cost of moving threads between cpus because the cache mastership change is invisibly handled by hardware, but the cost is still there and still very real.
-Matt hf
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.
"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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Once I tried Mandrake for PPC, I haven't looked back. Urpmi really helps with rpm ugliness and the large number of free update mirrors is sweet.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
Too much anime... I read that as "For example, the problem might have been Lain in the Passport login servers."
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Ontopic, now that OSX is based on BSD, what's the point, other than "it's cool?" Granted, "it's cool" is a great reason to screw around with stuff when you're bored, but what pratical purpose does this serve? If I'm paying extra bucks for Apple hardware, I might as well use their software.
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".
Linux distros specifically for Apple hardware should work really well since Apple's got a lot less hardware that you need to worry about being compatable with. That said, I can't get audio working on my 6500 :/
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
My employer uses it because we have many mission critical legacy programs that were written on Harris mainframes. Its that big vs little endian thing. So, we are using PPC servers with Yellow Dog. The programs are huge and cannot be converted for many reasons.
So, there are uses for it.
For those of you that can't RTFA, the torrents are here:
http://cvs.terraplex.com/~owen/ydl4_torrents/
Download early and often.
The reviewer was a whiny kid that tried comparing OS X to Linux, and then pitched a fit because he like Debian & Gentoo better than Red Hat but YDL runs like Red Hat. Boo hoo. The review didn't really say much worth reading.
My reasons for use of yellow dog have nothing to do with annoyance with X86 hardware. It differs from PPC hardware in interesting ways that give each their niche.
Rather, it's because I'm annoyed with windows. While I have ~6 functioning computers around at any one time, I do the majority of my office, graphics design, and development work on a Mac: Windows is broken and Linux doesn't run Adobe.
As an active consultant and developer, I upgrade my current desktop mac every 18-24 months.* This means I inevitably have multiple old macs sitting around in closets. When I need to put together a quick server for file backup or web app testing, I grab one and throw YDL on it.
Incidentally, though, when I do have x86 hardware lying around, I use that and debian instead. YDL can be kind of a PITA.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
In order to run Linux on "Old World" hardware you need an application called Bootx
http://penguinppc.org/~benh/
In order for it to work you need a Mac OS installed on the computer. On the beige G3's I have installed it on I usually set it up like this:
OS 8.1 installed on a 100 MB partition.
Install Bootx as an extention.
Install YDL using the remaining HD space.
All is good.
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.
It amazes me the amount of "Free software" users that use Mac OSX. I dont think they are about Free Software or they wouldnt be running it. Its about "Not Windows" for those people, it just happens to run some free software. Mac OS X is propriatary. For those of us who do want to run Linux on their ppc, there is yellowdog (covered in article above) or Fedora for ppc. Colin Charles has covered the install process at http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/ibook/fedorappc.ht ml
And the release announcement: http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/ibook/fc3.relnotes
and the .iso files are downloadable from:
http://fedoraproject.org/fedorappc/FC-3/
Its not perfect yet, but it is getting very close.
Yep! I had a 7600 running Debian PPC Linux using that quik bootloader for a while. Worked great once I got it all configured properly. (I recall having to do a little research and tweaking to finally get the X server working properly with the built-in video though.)
Only thing was, I ended up selling that machine to a Mac user who had an old 7100 that finally died on her - and I figured I'd just move my drives over to a 7500 I still hung onto. Uh-uh... never could get it to do anything besides boot to a black screen and freeze up. I think the 7500 had a more crippled/buggy edition of "open firmware" in it than most other 7x00 series PowerMacs did, so that probably was a big part of my problem.
I am frustrated because I cannot get the wireless networking running under YDL4 on my PowerBook. I would think all distros would have wireless covered by now, for any and all platforms.
[shrug?]
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
...uh-huh....i bet
Im getting replies from like 20 different articles in this Yellow Dog Linux articles. WTF?
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)
Now, let's see if the editors would allow a "Deb packaging sucks and is too political, as always" onto the front page.
May I also suggest the good ubuntu port for PowerPC? I'm using that on my 15" Al, aside with OS X, and it seems to be built very well...
I'm fat, you're ugly. I can get slimmer, and you?
SunOS was by fist Unix and it was great, they should have stuck with BSD
I'm probably going to get modded off-topic for asking this, but thanks for making me realize what it means when someone says comparing 'apples to oranges'. I remember thinking, 'wtf do apples and oranges have to do with [insert random conversation].' Now I know, thanks!
Ok, so back on topic. YaST (for SuSE) is horrible at resolving dependencies. On several occasions I've had it try to get old files from the cds, as opposed to using the new ones that were already set as a yast-source and were available. On one occasion it wanted to copy a file from the SuSE 9.2 disc 5 German!
A couple of iterations ago, setup was only a snap if it worked first time on your box. Who uses Yellow Dog Linux, anyway? I thought it was one of those military contract spin-offs Steve Jobs gets from his old NeXT spook connections?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
"half of the ibook hardware won't work." I'll assume that's just a bit of hyperbole. It is very frustrating, however, for someone like me, who mostly uses my ibook to surf the web and do email (no I'm not an old Korean person!) I wish Open Darwin "www.opendarwin.org/en/about.html" would start with a nice window manager by default. The nice thing about OS X is that you din't need to spend a lot of time installing or setting it up. BTW for other Apple laptops, 3rd party wireless card will work, but not the ibook :-(
What I find ironic is that while the classic Mac OS introduced to the public the magic of bootable CDs, these systems still can't boot cleanly to Linux, let alone use the increasingly popular Linux live CDs.
I still have an "Old World" 603e Powermac that Jobs said would run "Rhapsody" but when Mac OS X was finally released of course all pre-G3s were abandoned. Grrrr. Those days Apple was known and respected for their good long-term support and the long life span of their machines while MS was already notorious for their "planned obsolescence". Incidentally Apple's approach changed at the time when MS made the competitor-saving investment in Apple, but that shouldn't prevent Apple from divulging their now-obsolete firmware secrets to help keep the many still functioning pre-G3 systems in useful service. If they were easily booted into Linux using e.g. a live CD with light Xfce environment or as terminals booting from a server, these "Old World" machines could be useful for cash-strapped schools or at homes as secondary systems.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
The difference, you see trolls on the front page, and rarely fact, thats what linking to the article is for, let someone else deal with the pesky facts ...
Did you read the review? RPM Sucks is just one of many wonderful inexperienced writings that come out in this review. Ohh well what do you expect, its christmas eve, no one is home =)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
It wasn't perfect, but it was a lot cleaner. Sun has been slowly shifting back to BSD style tools under pressure from their Linux competition: they switched to AT&T at a time when there considering a merger or purchase by AT&T, and the deal fell through and left them with a bunch of fairly poor tools. But the hardware was solid and ran Linux fairly well: We see a similar state with even slightly out of date Mac hardware now.
I will soon check out RE-PC (Seattle used PC store; one of their location has Mac stuff) to see if they have any fantastic-bargain elder-statesman PPC machines.
:)
I'm also considering putting Ubuntu on the iBook, but only if / when it's all backed up and ready to undo if that's not satisfactory
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5