Those who intend to install a Linux distribution on a Sony PlayStation 3 will be pleased to learn that Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 is now available for free download. Originally released on 27 November, Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 is a Fedora-based distribution tailored to run on Sony PlayStation 3. It features a graphical installation program and includes the Linux kernel 2.6.16, X.Org 7.0 (3D acceleration not supported), Enlightenment 17 as the default desktop (KDE 3.5.3 and GNOME 2.14 are also available), Firefox 1.5, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 and other popular open source software applications for desktops, servers, media playback and software development.
Wow, Linux can be downloaded for free!!!
Next week’s news: “LINUX GOES OPEN SOURCE!!!”
We all know Linux can be downloaded for free. He’s just telling you that the free version of YDL is available. If you don’t know YDL then you wouldn’t know that they release first to paying customers then to the rest.
Selling free software, that’s really ethical…
Why download their crap when you could download a Linux distro that is not so immoral?
Selling free software, that’s really ethical…
So you don’t drink bottled water, or buy canned air Jeddacarn? Both water and air are “free” so therefore the people selling them are “immoral” right?
Maybe Yellow Dog actually *gasp* polishes up the free stuff, integrates it properly, tests it for quality, and even writes a few scripts of their own here and there just to make everything work a little better.
Unless you build your own Linux distro from scratch, they’re all equally “immoral” by your standards. Which distro do you use again?
Well, I don’t know if I’d go as far as saying that people who sell bottled water aren’t necessarily the immoral ones, though they’re taking advantage of an immoral situation. If it weren’t for all the companies that have ruined the water supplies for a lot of areas, we wouldn’t need to drink bottled water.
Yellow Dog Linux needs to make some money like everyone else, but they’re still making it available for free shortly after the release. How is this immoral? For the retail version, you get printed manuals, support, etc. That’s what the cost pays for, much like Red Hat.
Well, I don’t know if I’d go as far as saying that people who sell bottled water aren’t necessarily the immoral ones, though they’re taking advantage of an immoral situation. If it weren’t for all the companies that have ruined the water supplies for a lot of areas, we wouldn’t need to drink bottled water.
In the Netherlands we have perfectly good drinking water from tap but some people still buy bottled. One company pumps up it’s water from the same place as the local water company but gives it a fancy name.
Building a Linux distribution is not easy. Having many enhtuaistic contributors like Debian, or a wealthy owner like Ubuntu is not an option for most companies.
So they charge for some of their services (like support, documentation, building binaries, etc) in order to pay their expenses.
For an extreme example, telling hard working programmers like Alan Cox that they should not recieve a salary because RedHat should give away all their stuff for free is actually an insult to all computer engineers. (Ok, Alan no longer works for RedHat but he used to for a long time. And yes RedHat gives away all their suff for free, the example is for an anology of YellowDog situation).
Thus, as long as they give back most (or even better all) of their contributions back, I do not see a problem.
“(Ok, Alan no longer works for RedHat but he used to for a long time. And yes RedHat gives away all their suff for free, the example is for an anology of YellowDog situation). ”
Alan continues to work for Red Hat. Perhaps you got confused by the sabbatical he took to do his MBA a while back. Alan AT redhat.com if you need to verify.
Edited 2006-12-29 10:30
Not familiar with ‘free beer vs free speech’?
do we have to go through this free beer vs free speech again?
Irony aside, Yellow Dog does little for the GNU/Linux community. They have no hardware and they do nothing significant to FCx to turn it into Yellow Dog. I have always thought they were more about marketing to people outside the community (while giving the impression that they were part of the community). For years, they have parasitically claimed to be the key PowerPC Linux distribution because they ran on Macs (and now the PS3 helps them maintain this claim?!). Putting together a distribution is something others do and to say it like it is do much better than Yellow Dog. It seems the real business for them is in the services they provide to the systems they install. This is a business and value must be generated or they would not still be in business. They must have success here and I suggest here is where they stay focused. I am still not sure why they made this whole PS3 effort. Was it to replace Apple as a hardware platform? Sony does seem to have a problem and IBM has no cell based hardware for developers. Maybe this was the idea. If it was then Yellow Dog was a mistake. Gentoo, Debian or even SUSE (PowerPC is community driven with the strong support of Novell) would have been a better choice. If the objective was commercially then Sony should have gone with RedHat or SUSE and paid up for the effort instead of picking a weak partner and trying to get by with a low budget approach. Last point: Yellow Dog is too much based in the USA and not in touch with the development community.
/R
Before my comment, I’ll say I ran YellowDog before, and was overall pleased with it’s stability and such. A decent distro for what it does.
That said, what kind of surprised me is if you look at the contents of one of their srpms, you may find the only change they did to the upstream redhat/fedora version was rebranding, not much in way of actually coding to optimize for the PPC platform or whatever. Also, unless I was doing something wrong, what was a bit disturbing was after I’d installed it (and some time had passed between it’s initial release and when I’d actually tried the thing), there was only a pithy of updates available. Much, much less than was available from Redhat for the same rpms. Kind of got me wondering what they were doing with their stuff and were they were going with it…
A Linux distro for the Sony Playstation 3, and the first production use of the long-awaited E17 environment. These are major achievements. Why the negativity?
Major achievements? Where have you been? It is not so much “negativity” as it is anti-positivity. YDL is famous for big and fluffy announcements, more PR than anything else. For example, the Gentoo Community released a PS3 overlay before YDL and they never announce anything until it was up and online. YDL make big announcements, etc. and well before the PS3 release. These are the facts. YDL is Fedora. A tweak here, a tweak there and we add a logo and a dog for a nice image. Nothing against those that made an effort, but seriously is this GNU/Linux? I think not. YDL support for the PS3 was a parasitic attempt to steal the spotlight in all the promotion with the PS3 launch. Too bad the PS3 was a flop like YDL 5.0.
R/
YDL is Fedora.
So I can download Fedora now and run it on my PS3, including a fully working and operational E17 environment? Mmm, I must’ve missed something.
Trolls make less and less sense these days.
Thom, need I remind you…
http://www.digitmag.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=6370
http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/10/17/yellow.dog.linux.v50/
I could go on…
Then, there is this:
http://lowendmac.com/crews/05/1221.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux
YDL is Fedora and more, but that is what it is. Did Sony officially support YDL any more than any other distribution? It seems YDL tried to give this impression.
Calling the play like it was makes me a troll? That is my opinion and that what this site is for. Your opinions first and ours ??????
R/
Since you refuse to answer my question, I will give you a 2nd chance:
So I can download Fedora now and run it on my PS3, including a fully working and operational E17 environment? Mmm, I must’ve missed something.
As much as I like Linux, if Sony, YD don’t support a distribution that fully supports PS3 hardware, I’ll skip it.
Currently I’m happy with PS2 Linux and maybe in the future I’ll jump ship to XNA. Sorry Sony but as a gamer I’m where the fun is all about.
metalink ( http://www.metalinker.org/ ) with all mirrors and checksum at
http://www.metalinker.org/samples.html
Has anyone here actually ran the desktop, I’m thinking about going with yellowdog and giving E17 a try but, I was hoping for a little feedback before I started. Also, have they resolved the SPE issue (last time I checked it linux was only using one SPE on the ps3)
YDL 5.0 doesn’t support 3D accel on the PS3, no surprise there, but it doesn’t support 2D accel either. You use the framebuffer instead. Not sure how this affects performance.