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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.
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.
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
"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
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.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
± 29 dB
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.
Would you mind repeating that a little louder? Someone a block over is using a G4 "mirrored door", and their fan kicked in just as you were speaking. =)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
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...
Bring out the CISC-versus-RISC skeleton was not a very good decision, simply because it Doesn't Apply (TM). Face it - most processors in the 21st century are a *&$#( to classify as either RISC or CISC.
/preferred/ to program as if IA-32 was RISC-ish. See gcc -S output. Finally, the traditional characteristic of RISC processors, yes pipelining, has been available for ages the IA-32. So... is it pure CISC? Maybe not?
Lets see the current facts:
1) The clearly CISC-ish IA-32, at the current stage has half its 8086/80186/80286 (and I do mean the 16-bit) instruction set deprecated. Those *complex action performing* instructions have not had any performance edge over the simpler once since the days of the 80486, and shouldn't be used... unless your prerogative is code-size rather than performance. So, in other words, it is now
2) The clearly RISC-ish PowerPC received a healthy injection of CISC-ishness with the arrival of Motorola's Altivec in G4. Sorry, those SIMD extensions are not RISC-ish. So is this a pure RISC? Maybe not?
There are plenty of reasons to hate the IA-32. As a kernel developer (homebrew project) I find the IA-32 a register-starved architecture, systems programming for which is a pain-in-the-ass considering the oddball hacks that the Protected Mode and IBM's design of the IBM PC AT were. As a neophyte PowerPC assembly programmer (I did hack Quik to remove the stupid linux kernel size restriction though). I thoroughly enjoy the PPC ISA and I am in love with the PPC memory management facilities.
It is a stupid to claim that Apple laptops consume less power simply because x86 is CISC(ish) and THUS uses more power. Design matters, but implementation matters too. Take a look over at the Athlon. The Athlon is its own architecture that has an x86 personality (apparently emulates the IA-32) - but the design of the processor has nothing to do with any Intel design. Looking even at Intel designs, the P3 (... and Penium M) and P4 designs differ. The P3 builds on the success of the Pentium Pro/II while P4 is well... IMHO a flop... and intel should just lean on the Pentium M.
It is not prudent to claim that the latest IA-32 and AMD-64 processors owe anything more to the 8086 MCU other than a half of largely unused, despised, deprecated performance-lacking instructions as well as opcode compatibility.
There are plenty of reason why I am soon to put $1k into the purchase of an iBook - but not because PowerPC "is a a RISC-based architecture" unlike that "aging, bulky CISC" x86.
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
From what I understand, the main thing that differentiates RISC from CISC is that CISC code goes through a translation layer in the CPU, wheras with RISC the opcodes you use are exactly what gets executed by the CPU - thus reducing complexity within the processor, and pushing it up to a higher level (the compiler).
The comments of those saying that in x86 the instruction set gets translated to a RISC like one by the CPU are basically proving the point that the x86 archetecture is very definitely CISC.
I have no idea whether or not PPC has a translation layer, but I wouldn't say that the existence of SIMD extensions alone disqualify it from being RISC.....
However, you're right - RISC vs CISC is pretty much irrelevant these days....
Advanced users are users too!
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)
Not an (i|Power)Book owner (yet!!) but AFAIK there is no Airport Express support in YDL. So if you have an iBook or PB12" you will have to get a USB WiFi adapter, or get another PCMCIA WiFi card for the rest of the PBs. I recommend anything based on the PrismII chipset (use wlan, orinoco_cs, or hostap drivers). Btw, if you are going to buy a Linksys WPC11 - get v.3. AVOID WPC11 v.4 - its based around some obscure Realtek chipset and the drivers suck (and are x86 only, and crash on anything older than 2.4.18). http://alumni.imsa.edu/~andyw/projects/wpc11v4.htm l
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?