Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 Reviewed

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Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 Reviewed

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday December 23, 2004 @02:31PM from the walking-the-dog dept.

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."

16 of 368 comments (clear)

Has it's place... by vwjeff · 2004-12-23 14:38 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
1. Re:Has it's place... by mr_don't · 2004-12-23 15:00 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Yes, actually, this is a great niche for YDL.
  
  I have also witnessed YDL 3 turn throw away g3 macs into stable, useful desktop systems, running firefox, snappy word processors like ABIWORD, and things like XMMS and Mplayer for multimedia.
Yellow Dog 3 on an Old PowerPC = great by mr_don't · 2004-12-23 14:55 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
1. Re:Yellow Dog 3 on an Old PowerPC = great by DirePickle · 2004-12-23 15:01 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  And as fast, too! I kid, I kid.
Aluminium 17" by chrome · 2004-12-23 15:04 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
1. Re:Aluminium 17" by dasunt · 2004-12-23 17:57 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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:Or.... by Jonathan · 2004-12-23 15:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

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 by bogie · 2004-12-23 15:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

"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
1. Re:Sigh by Stevyn · 2004-12-23 16:32 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
Quit Complaining About RPM by texroot · 2004-12-23 15:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
1. Re:Quit Complaining About RPM by texroot · 2004-12-23 18:05 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
Keep in mind.... by Oliver+Aaltonen · 2004-12-23 15:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.... by Ohreally_factor · 2004-12-23 16:37 · Score: 4, Funny

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.
Bootx... by vwjeff · 2004-12-23 16:37 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:Or.... by andreyw · 2004-12-23 18:18 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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 /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?

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.
Re:Or.... by mabinogi · 2004-12-23 18:42 · Score: 3, Informative

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....

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