Terra Soft Solutions completed the first Yellow Dog Linux developers summit, resulting in a two-year Yellow Dog Linux roadmap for PowerPC. With the next release of Yellow Dog Linux Terra Soft will offer 32-bit and 64-bit products built upon Red Hat’s RPM-based Fedora.From the press release:
‘Yellow Dog Linux’ — Terra Soft’s 32-bit offering will continue to be offered from Terra Soft pre-installed on Apple computers, from Terra Soft’s on-line Store in Geek Edition and box set packaging, through retail stores world-wide, and for download from YDL.net Enhanced and the public FTP mirrors.
‘Y-HPC’ — Terra Soft’s new 64-bit offering will be available pre-installed on Apple, IBM, and Momentum 970-based hardware, from the Terra Soft Store, and for download from the forthcoming YDL.net Professional account.
Built on the 2.6 kernel and 32-bit libraries, Yellow Dog Linux will officially support Apple USB-G3s, G4s, and G5 towers. Built upon the 2.6 kernel, both 32- and 64-bit libraries, Y-HPC will provide full 64-bit support for 970 (G5) based systems, offering double-precision, 16GB (8GB tested to date) memory addressing, and the gcc 64-bit tool chain.
At present time, 64-bit computing enables applications to address up to 16GB of RAM, enabling very large datasets to be held entirely in memory. 64-bit also enables ‘double-precision’, referring to the number of decimal places processed natively by the CPU. 64-bit code is typically associated with high performance computing while 32-bit code is associated with home, office, internet and application servers.
Yellow Dog Linux will be offered on 8 CDs, 4 application and 4 source, in order to maintain support for older systems. Y-HPC will be offered on 2 DVDs, one application, the other source.
Built upon Yellow Dog Linux v3.0.1, a beta version of Y-HPC is now available for download via YDL.net Enhanced accounts, offering double-precision, 8GB memory addressing, 64-bit tool chain, and the 2.6 kernel.
Both Yellow Dog Linux and Y-HPC are slated to ship with the close of May.
Our Take: Terra Soft has made it clear to me in the past that they are shooting mostly for the enterprise/server market, so I was wondering why base their new solutions on Fedora and not upon the RPMs of Red Hat Enterprise Server.
Terra Soft has made it clear to me in the past that they are shooting mostly for the enterprise/server market, so I was wondering why base their new solutions on Fedora and not upon the RPMs of Red Hat Enterprise Server.
Probably because bringing the “new and shiny” to PPC has become somewhat of a Terra Soft responsibility.
That doesn’t play well with me.
They told me that they are shooting for server stuff, and not OSX converts. They were absolutely clear to me about this.
To my mind, using Fedora instead of RHEL is a mistake for this kind of business they try to get in. Fedora is buggy, RHEL has seen more “love” from Red Hat and from what I heard, it is faster.
To my mind, using Fedora instead of RHEL is a mistake for this kind of business they try to get in.
I agree, it doesn’t make sense. Maybe they’ve estimated that the benefits of keeping the “new and shiny customers” outweighs chances of success in the enterprise market. If they just want to focus on servers, they’d be one the few companies that’d benefit from a slick competitor. Victim of their own popularity perhaps?
Doesn’t Fedora already support PPC out of the box anyway? If so, what does Yellow Dog even bring to the table? Seems to be like it’s just going to be Fedora, only always two steps behind…
Mullighan, neither Fedora nor Red Hat run on PPC. YDL is the Red Hat of PPC.
…neither Fedora nor Red Hat run on PPC
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development…
If they just want to focus on servers, they’d be one the few companies that’d benefit from a slick competitor.
Come to think of it, Apple is that “slick competitor”. So yeah, Eugenia, not using RHEL doesn’t make much sense.
Does YellowDog contribute to Fedora? That would make sense since Fedora has a PPC port.
If they don’t contribute, shame on them. They are just using Fedora PPC. I take this back if the above paragraph is true.
Bascule, thanks for the link. I haven’t seen that one before. I just checked their main download page, and all they had was i386 and x86-64. The PPC stuff looks like it’s still under development, though. I think what TerraSoft is doing is just making it a simple install process and maybe optimizing it somehow. They also offer very good support.
If they have iso that actually installs on a G5, then hooray!!
I have been looking for one that a mere mortal can install on a single cpu 64bit(1.6ghz) G4. Although Fedora does offer the rpm’s, I haven’t seen them offer a bootable iso for download. They may have, and I’m sorry if they do, but I’m unaware of it. The only linux I have gotten to boot on my machine is the Gentoo os, and it crapped out on the Sata drives ( hence the “mere mortals” comment) I’m not bashing Gentoo, I’d love to be able to install and run it, but it’s far advanced of my humble linux knowledge (3+ years!!). So if this one works, and is optimized for 64 bit code, yee haw! A review from one of the linux guru’s on it would be greatly appreciated!
“on a single cpu 64bit(1.6ghz)G5”
If enough people start supporting it. I mean, if SUSE for example decided to use Fedora as a base, they could just choose the Core they want to use, lets say Core 2, and make a distro based on that. This could also gurantee binary compatibility for many distros. Actually Mandrake could actually benefit most from this. I suppose they are stretched thin when it comes to manpower. They could leverage each other’s capacity. They just strip out the Redhat specific ocnfig tools, and put their own there, and the rest remains exactly the same.
That is the best idea I have heard in a long time.
But one thing I would like to see is them speeding up the distro.
I didn’t know Fedora has a PPC version, and I thought I was stuck with this old PC only. Thanks.
I am pretty sure that those are just development, it’s not really released, I think you can use those rpm’s with ydl though, don’t quote me cause I am not totally sure myself.
Is RHEL still a community supported open source project? Can you create direct derivative works based on the RHEL source code? Anyway, I think YDL has traditionally used the Red Hat Linux Project’s source code. RHEL might be a bit behind Fedora and hence YDL. I could be wrong here.
I installed Gentoo 2004.0 on my Dual 2.0Ghz G5 over the weekend. If you follow the instructions on Gentoo’s homepage it really works without any trouble. Oh, and I decided to go for the 2.6.5 kernel from kernel.org and it compiled and worked without any problems, too.
I guess YDL 64bit Linux won’t be affordable for those of us who want to tinker with Linux for non-commercial purposes.
I printed out the whole manual for gentoo, followed it exactly as it was written, and got hung up on the following points:
1) it never guessed my eth0, and I must admitt i couldn’t tell you which driver is required by linux
2) couldn’t figure out how to get it to see the hd’s (i have 2 80gig sata’s) i know the bsd names for them, but that didn’t seem to help me much. Is it missing a sata driver??? couldn’t figure it out.
These things are probably due to my ignorance of the gentoo system, I’m sure the handbook will be updated to reflect the new gear in the near future. If only the anaconda or mandrake install were followed by all linux distro’s!! Yes , I’m spoiled by the gui and should have better command of vi and or pico, but to me, once the first person figure’s out how to install it, do we all need to go through the command line frustration? alot of people don’t think so. I’ve noticed the people in gentoo forum’s were very helpfull, but if your not at that level of knowledge, you’re lost. like myself. I know I’ll get there some day, if i just keep trying.
You need to compile the SATA driver, the thermal management driver and the SUN… (can’t remember, but you’ll see it) ethernet card driver (it’s in the 10MBps section) into the kernel.
The easiest way to get a nice working kernel is downloading the 2.6.5 sources, copy the default G5 config from the arch/ppc64 directory, do a make menuconfig and activate the thermal management driver (leave everything else as it is), save and do
make vmlinux modules modules_install
For the rest, follow Gentoo’s instructions.
Hi
Yes. derivate works are possible and exist
caos
taolinux
whiteboxlinux