“How does a distribution that’s a carbon copy of Red Hat 9 install and perform better than Red Hat 9 itself? By having the inside track on the platform being used, that’s how. Brian Proffitt had the opportunity to use Red Hat 9 on an Intel notebook and Yellow Dog 3.0 on an iBook recently, and in terms of ease of installation and ease of use, Yellow Dog won by a big, wet nose” LinuxPlanet claims.
Yellow Dog Linux 3.0: Better Red Hat Linux than Red Hat Linux 9
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I had the same basic experience. After using YDL 2.3, going to 3.0 was like being shot into space, it was such a huge improvement. It’s the only OS on my iBook. It’s really a joy to use.
I used YDL from 2.0-2.2 on my old G4, and it was a great distro. Well supported and the YDL staff are very helpful, if I still had the machine I’m sure YDL3 would be on it.
YDL is great. It put life back into my 7500.
I gotta try this out. Sad part is, I love Mac OS X, and only have ~6 gigs of space left…
If only there was an HFS+ partitioning tool so I didn’t have to format..
> If only there was an HFS+ partitioning tool so I didn’t
> have to format..
There is, for about $20 as I recall. FWB Partition ToolKit, see http://www.fwb.com and hunt for it.
One draw back: ALL it can do is shrink a partition, creating free space. It can add that free space back to the partition it came from, but NOT to any other. It probably does exactly what you need, though (creates free space that can be formatted as a new partition.)
…i have a G3/400 mhz and i can not do what i want. i do not
have a lot of money right now to buy mac software. i got a copy of ydl 3.0 and i am going to install it tonight. i comes
with a lot of apps for free and you can do more things in your computer. i tried ydl 2.3 and i liked it a lot but my wife complained about it. last night i showed her a couple of screenshots of the new ydl 3.0 and she wants to try it. after reading this article((and others)), i have decided to go for it.
bravo ydl.
– 2501
One thing to watch for: I installed YDL 3 as the sole OS on an iBook, G3/300 64MB. Not exactly the latest thing, ran OS 9 well, useless for OS X, but well in range for YDL.
The install was painless. It took a few reboots to see my router but everything else worked perfectly. Only problem was speed: on this machine YDL 3 was unusably slow (7-8 minutes to bring up Open Office, 3-4 minutes for Konqueror, only about a minute for the Terminal. During most of this time the mouse was frozen, or nearly so.)
This wasn’t a loaded system, either: all the dev stuff but NO servers, and nothing else running when I timed it. I got 60+ MB of updates in hopes there was a fix, but it had no effect.
I got a few suggestions from their (excellent) mailing list, but nothing helped. I’m planning to put OS 9 back on when I get the chance. Back to RH9 on the ‘ol Athlon.
Buy more RAM, running any machine with only 64mb isn’t worth it, RAM is cheap get atleast 256mb
I agree. Red Hat Linux needs a minimum of 128 MB of RAM in graphical mode according to Red Hat. And so is YDL. Upgrade your RAM to 192 MB at least, just buy a 128 MB DIMM/SIMM (whatever your ibook accepts).
> Red Hat Linux needs a minimum of 128 MB of RAM in
> graphical mode according to Red Hat. And so is YDL.
True, but…
I can’t justify $100 worth of memory (trash the 64, add a 256) to run Linux on the iBook. It runs OS 9 just fine and my wife is happy with that.
YDL has a supported hardware list, but nowhere on their site or web-accessible docs could I find any mention of memory requirements. Many of the older machines they target originally came w/ 64MB or less. It seemed worth 3 blank CD’s and a couple of hours to give it a go.
I’m not upset w/ YDL, it looks like a fine distro. I may get around to trying it on my TiBook at some point.
I hope my experience will save someone from _buying_ CD’s they can’t use.
Well, it is not exactly as you say. YDL and even REd Hat says that they run on 64 MB of RAM, but only when used on text mode. If you want to use graphics and DEs, you need at least 128 MB.
Paul: I run OS X on a Biege G3/266/384MB, as well as OS 9, and on it’s sister box, a G3/233/128MB, running YDL. As a previous poster had mentioned, RAM needs to be realistic for the OS.
I have a Sun SPARCstation 5 with 32 megs of RAM. It runs Solaris 2.6 and earlier just fine, as well as OpenBSD. But try some of the other flavors, and it can move like molases in wintertime.
My point being, RAM can make a BIG difference with some OS, as in my case, 384MB makes up for CPU. Operating systems that were designed for the intended platfrm often work the best.
I like my 7200, Biege G3s, and old Sparcs… Every box has a purpose. =)
-iGZo
one doesn’t really need a repartition tool since Carbon Copy Cloner has been around. dupe you OS X setup offworld to a firewire HD / reboot and reinstall or repartition as you see fit and then clone back your OS X system back onto your Mac. it’s also good for full system backups.
Seems to me the answer is obvious. Take fairly comparable PPC and x86 systems and set them side-by-side with generically the same OS and the PPC will always win. The PPC is simply more efficient.
But, if you really think about it, YDL isn’t even related to RH9. All of the code has to be compiled for PPC. Just because the source code is relatively the same doesn’t translate. It is like saying that siblings are the same because they came from the same parents…it doesn’t work that way…
Kit
> Seems to me the answer is obvious. Take fairly comparable PPC and x86 systems and set them side-by-side with generically the same OS and the PPC will always win. The PPC is simply more efficient.
Not really. I think you’re trying to assume that comparable mean the same mhz, which you simply is uncomparable between x86/ppc.
Basically, what we have now is 1Ghz G4s outperforming 2Ghz P4s, but falling well behind 3Ghz P4s.
*yaaaaaaaawn*
*yaaaaaaaawn* too ;o)
I installed it on my iBook700/640/20GB. It worked great, initially I was absolutely 100% impressed.
However, with more extensive use came several nasty problems:
1) The OOo they bundle is completely USELESS!!! There is NO WAY TO PASTE. This is a known problem, yet they had released no updated RPMs. When I posted to the mailing list about this I got two replies: a) There is no official PPC OOo packager, would you like to do it? and b) Try OOo 1.1b, which is a PITA to install on PPC due to the poor Java support on PPC linux.
2) The redhat-config-network tool has major problems with Airport cards. While doing it manually works okay, and several workarounds are in place, again there were no updated RPMs. Users were left to languish on the mailing list, I can’t tell you how many posted with this problem in the month and a half that I subscribed.
Anyway, those were the two big problems I had. There were others, but they were at least mostly my fault. (I tried their experimental HFS+-enabled kernel, which almost killed my OSX partition and disabled my Firewire drive, but it was posted as experimental, so I knew the trade-offs going in.)
I used YDL 3 for a few months, and then I gave away the iBook to my fiancee. It is undoubtably the best (or at least easiest) Linux for PPC, but it’s not perfect.
Please don’t take this as a flame – it’s not. I _really_ liked the product, it’s just that I consider the two issues I outlined above to be major show-stoppers. That they both slipped through Terrasoft’s QA really surprised me, especially given the care and effort that they so obviously put into other aspects of the distribution.
(Having said all of this, it was still the best out-of-the-box laptop Linux experience I’ve had.)
I bought a 256M PC133(PC100/66 compatible) SODIMM on ebay for $25 + $5 s/h. put it in my 1st edition iBook(32M) and it works fine. it’s a great cheap upgrade, it won’t make the system much more usable for OSX, but it’s worth it for making OS9 and Linux/bsd run nicely.
I have a Sun SPARCstation 5 with 32 megs of RAM.
I have an SS5/110 w/256M and it still runs like crap. trust me, Linux is no speed demon on Sparc. even on the newer USparc machines it seems to lag way behind Solaris or Net/OpebBSD as far as speed.
I’ve been seriously thinking about buying a used iMac from eBay and trying YDL 3 on it.
Like you, I also like OS X, and will not put anything on my iMac, but at the price of a slightly older used iMac, I’d be willing to try it.
Now if I could only convince my wife to let me buy one….
🙂
It is fair to say that Apple’s WebCore (the engine of Safari) was originally based off of the KHTML engine.
However with the number and the depth of the changes that Apple made to KHTML and then later submitted back to the project it would almost be more correct to say the KHTML is now based on WebCore