As promised earlier this month, ISO images of the recently released Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 are now available for free download from Terra Soft’s FTP site and mirrors, as well as via BitTorrent.
Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 Available for Download
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Too bad that many of the “big” packages already are out of date. Especially i’m wondering about “Xorg 6.6”. IIRC the first release was Xorg 6.7.0….
i like debian for my powerbook, it’s got everything you need on the package-mirrors and it’s .deb (apt) instead of rpm-based
drawback is that packages aren’t always the newest esp. if you’re not on “sid”
– altough i never tried YDL! (tried SuSE and co. on i386, didn’t like RPM)
I have a feeling Ubuntu might give these folks a real run for there money… At least on the Desktop side of things.
The distinctive of YDL versus other PPC Linux distros is fine-tunong for Apple hardware. I’m pretty excited about Ubuntu, for instance, but rather doubt their team has made the time to craft things like fan support for the G5 Powermac’s array of blowers.
I could be wrong in that particular case. But if you load YDL on Apple hardware, you can be pretty sure your iBook power management will be flawless and your Airport card (except Airport Extreme, which is proprietary) will be the closest thing to plug-and-play. YDL is a particularly good solution for Linux folk who want a smooth laptop experience.
The price is bleeding-edge software packages. That’s really always been the case with Linux on PPC, anyway.
I have had the wonderful oppurtunity to try YDL (I beieve it was 3.x something), on a friend’s PowerBook. She bought it from Terrasoft Solutions, it came with Mac OS X Panther, and YDL 3.x) I really like using the MOL (Mac On Linux) It gave was nice to have a beautiful and functional Linux desktop, with the mac desktop/applications running too. I found yellowdog a little slow to boot, and for some reason the KDE menu would lag the fisrt time you used it, for like 3 seconds. But even after restarting X and KDE, the menu never lagged again, only that one time, the fisrt time you load KDE at boot.
As far as the rest, YDL seemed fast, responsive and versitile, and the MOL was nice because the speed was near native.
/my 2 cents
I bought YDL4 over the net on Thursday, still waiting for the box to arrive…
Then again I’m still waiting for the Mac to arrive as well, but I think I’ll start downloading the ISO’s now as Cork-Dublin is quicker than Colorado-Dublin; and my ancient 5400 should still be supported by 4.0
I only bought the Mac to use Linux/BSD on it 🙂
if you want a linux laptop, then a powerbook with ydl is not a bad choice. they are not too expensive compared to the competition when you take into account size, battery life, speed, screen quality etc. i have an over year old powerbook titanium 1ghz, and i still get 3 hours of surfing the wireless internet. it sleeps when i close the lid. volume and screen brightness keys work. good sound. plays dvds. very straight forward to install, recongised everything. (although i had to fiddle a line of my X config to turn on 3d acceleration on my ati radeon)
i recomend xfce as a desktop, can be yum’ed.
it is a bit slow to get the latest packages, but they are advertising for a packaging engineer (or something like that) at the mo so they could close the gap with ubuntu.
sam
I can’t wait I hope it’s as good as the last one.
Then again I’m still waiting for the Mac to arrive as well, but I think I’ll start downloading the ISO’s now as Cork-Dublin is quicker than Colorado-Dublin; and my ancient 5400 should still be supported by 4.0
I only bought the Mac to use Linux/BSD on it>>
Kian, things may have changed since YDL 3.x but …
Under YDL 3.x “old world” macs had to be set up as dual boot machines.
Also, during the time I was on it, nobody on the YDL newbies list ever got an “old world” machine to boot to a GUI desktop.
Again, these things may have changed with 4.0, but I found YDL’s support of apple hardware under 3.x to be spotty at best.
Here’s my comment from the last YDL topic on osnews.com. Sadly, nothing much has changed:
I’m a YDL enhanced member and got 4.0 for a couple of weeks now.
There are a few show stoppers: On my old PowerBook G4/400 Titanium, you can only install in text mode and after that you manually have to configure X.
On my 12″ G4/1.33 GHz PowerBook Airport Extreme is still unsupported (i know, it’s Broadcom’s fault, but Terrasoft could at least get them to provide a binary driver for ppc) as is sleep mode on both machines.
Sound works on both machines during setup, but on none afterwards.
Terrasoft still doesn’t ship decent Notebook keymaps, which would be especially important for users with international keyboards.
Terrasoft doesn’t ship a Java VM with it – can’t be too hard, to license IBM’s (which is available as a free downloard) VM, can it?
yum doesn’t work – at least it didn’t work yesterday, though I configured it correctly to use my YDL Enhanced account.
The distribution defaults to KDE, but it somehow seems that it was tailored towards Gnome. Strange.
Powermanagement/Sleep doesn’t work either.
So whats the point then of using YDL as oppossed to a distribution like Ubuntu? With Ubuntu, things pretty much work out of the box. I’m using a Powerbook 12″ 1.33 GHz, and sound, video, bluetooth, firewire work out of the box. My printers work, my digital camera is automatically detected and GPhoto is launched when I plug in my camera. All I’m missing is the standard 3D accleration, wireless and sleep functionality.
Since YDL is a PPC only distro and still doesn’t support those much needed missing functions, what reason is there to use them? From what I’ve read so far on the net, there’s none.
The point? Well, if you use it commercially you’re probably better of with a company behind a distribution to provide support.
Anyway, regardless of the distribution – Linux is not worth a lot on current Apple hardware (esp. PowerBooks) in regard to the supported hardware. That’s sad but true.
Since YDL is a PPC only distro and still doesn’t support those much needed missing functions, what reason is there to use them?>>
You *like* to slog through reams and reams of code and fix broken stuff for the sheer joy of being an unpaid YDL coder/beta tester?
You *like* to slog through reams and reams of code and fix broken stuff for the sheer joy of being an unpaid YDL coder/beta tester?
Eh? If I don’t, does that mean there’s no point to using YDL then?
Eh? If I don’t, does that mean there’s no point to using YDL then?>>
If you want/need your Mac to behave like a Mac, avoid YDL. You will not get the same sort of functionality. You cannot count on the programs it comes with or the hardware things you’re used to “just working”.
However, I know some people who are doing things like running servers and such and they like YDL very much as a server os. It’s stable. (YDL puts most of their efforts into making sure the hardware support for Xserves is strong — that’s where they make their big sales.)
Also if you have a G5 and want to take full advantage of its 64bitness to crunch some heavy data, there is a 64 bit version of YDL, or you can snag the source and do some custom compling and tweaking.
There *are* reasons to use YDL, but take into mind it’s basically a port of Red Hat to the PPC if you want to run it as a desktop OS.
Sure, it’s a great way to use older PPC equipment, but as for buying a 17″ powerbook loaded up with YDL? I think you’d have to be out of your mind. YDL does have very good PPC support, but let’s face it: linux on x86 is still somewhat of a niche player in a large market, and PPC linux is a very small niche within a niche. Support from 3rd parties is nearly nonexistent, and many things that are a given in x86 linux simply do not exist in PPC linux. IMO, if you’re looking to drop a few grand on a computer and need/want to use linux, you’d be much better off going x86.
FWIW, I own several macs, too, so this isn’t an anti-apple post by any means.
I use Linux on the desktop. Have been doing that for nearly 3 years now so I’m no stranger to configuring my Linux box. That said, newer distros tend to work pretty much out of the box. Case in point, Ubuntu Linux. I think this is great.
While I don’t expect my devices on the powerbook to Just Work(TM) out of the box, I do expect to be able to somehow configure them to work. With wireless, 3D acceleration and sleep, this is impossible on PPC Linux. Which is a real shame especially if a PPC oriented distro like YDL can’t get nVidia and Broadcom to release closed source drivers.
I’d like to run Linux on my Powerbook because I’m using Java. Sure, OS X comes with Java and IMHO it’s got the best integration of Java at the moment, but it is lacking in some ways. These failings are addressed by IBM’s JVM which is only available on Linux. A simple benchmark of my work on the IBM JVM shows that it is easily *twice* as fast as the Apple JVM.
There are some of us who’d like to run Linux on our Powerbooks. OS X is very nice. Linux is just nicer at some things.
The md5sums are missing and I needed to verify one of my files as cd 1 did not validate the first time so I downloaded it 2 twice to make sure it was ok before I burned it again.
The md5sums that I have.
33f5f2a407f36dfbb01946ece46bdf73 yellowdog-4.0-orion-20041107-install1.iso
fa44f23ee41261a16d85b90b77fe080b yellowdog-4.0-orion-20041107-install2.iso
ce2b1db0395863e2af75bdcf303713f9 yellowdog-4.0-orion-20041107-install3.iso
9231fbae8ab35f0f34c7a05cdc821820 yellowdog-4.0-orion-20041107-install4.iso
YDL came today. The iBook hasn’t….
Extremely fast service, nice shiny box, SIXTEEN CD’s, good printed manual, good quality t-shirt.
Lets just hope the damn OS is good now 🙂
Having installed YDL 4.0 as my primary OS (formatted my hard drive by mistake), I want to watch movies and listen to music on my G5, is there any way to get the audio working on G5. Thanks, installation was a walk in the park though.