Some notes from a Yellowdog 4.0 installation along with some screenshots.
Notes from a Yellowdog 4.0 installation
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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And I’d be interested in hearing several weeks and months later how it’s changed your use of your computer. Do you use YDL only occasionally, for some tasks, but OSX for the rest? Is it faster? Do the apps works as expected? How does it compare from an ‘ease of use’, and ‘look and feel’ perspective? Etc…
my install worked, but YD4 does not have thermal support for my powermac7,3 G5. thus my fans run at full speed, which is quite annoying. yellowdog seems like a half-assed attempt to me. they dont even attempt to get drivers for hardware such as airport extreme and 3d graphics drivers from the vendors. they could do the linux ppc community a great justice by working with the vendors for even binary drivers. i’ll stick with my gentoo-ppc64, which is purely 64bit, thanks.
I bought an iBook a few weeks ago. (I ordered mine the very day the updated models were announced.) It’s my first Mac PC, and my first exposure to OSX. I really like the hardware, but the OS is … well … not for me. OSX is the most unresponsive Operating System I have ever seen. Even after I added an extra 512MB of memory on top of the 256MB it came with.
Anyway – I’ve been thinking of installing Gentoo Linux on it, but one thing I’m curious about is the hardware. It has an Airport 802.11g card in it. I’m not sure what the chipset details are on Apple’s wireless cards so I’m not sure if this card is supported under Linux.
One thing I do really like about OSX is that it has the best power management I have ever seen. Close the lid and the system instantly goes to sleep. When I open the lid, it’s back up and running even before I have finished lifting the lid. Battery life is pretty awesome on this thing too. Under regular use (wireless and even occasionally accessing the cdrom drive), I get close to 4 hours of continuous use.
Being that it is a laptop, I would hate to lose the suspend functionality. I have never been able to get suspend to work on my Desktop machine. It will go to sleep, but it will never wake up … whether I suspend to RAM, or “hibernate” to disk. Either way, it goes down, but won’t come up again.
But as long as the wireless works, and if I can get suspend features working, I’d just as soon run Linux I think. OSX doesn’t really do it for me. Maybe if the iBook had several gig of RAM and a couple of 3 or 4GHz processors, the OS might actually be able to keep up.
I wonder can you run the Apple native programs without running the entire Aqua interface?
I mean you can run an Xserver on OSX. Can you fire up Fluxbox or KDE.
Then run Apple programs without Aqua taking over the display?
If that is possible, then you have all the powermanagement and HW support you need.
Can some of the more knowledgeable users comment on this question please?
um, power management and hardware access is done by the main kernel running on the machine. Running OS X through some kind of emulation layer isn’t going to magically let OS X take care of talking to the wireless card and suspending the machine. Sorry.
“Anyway – I’ve been thinking of installing Gentoo Linux on it, but one thing I’m curious about is the hardware. It has an Airport 802.11g card in it. I’m not sure what the chipset details are on Apple’s wireless cards so I’m not sure if this card is supported under Linux.”
Apple won’t release any information about the Airport Extreme and therefore it will not work in linux. You need a USB wireless nic or use the ethernet.
RE: @blixel
Its still linux, you cannot run Apple programs on linux without an emulator, and definatelly not the kernel without emulator
I don’t see what you’re saying about it being non-responsive. i have a 1.33ghz G4 15″ PB and it is pretty darn quick at doing nearly everything. once in awhile i’ll get a beach ball due to something taking a bit of time to process (typically firefox with a large page)… i’ve had mine for about 7 months too and it’s working great and have never really had a problem that wasn’t easily fixable. i actually really enjoy OS X too, i would like to get a G5 desktop to replace my athlon xp system soon as i just feel more productive in os x… but i guess whatever works for you works and whatever works for me works for me..
might as well stick with your OS X install. no support for wireless, nor true suspend.
@logik
i’ve heard the same thing about os x being unresponsive. i believe a lot of the impression comes down to something as simple as the mouse acceleration/speed. i use os x on a 1ghz 12″ powerbook and a dual-1.8 G5 and its responsive for me on both. granted, the G5 is a bit quicker
In no way did I suggest an emulation layer.
Is it possible to load MacOSX without a graphical display that we know as this.
http://images.apple.com/macosx/images/indexcallouts10082003.jpg
Just a command line. If this is true read my above question again.
Run Apple programs on Linux.
KDE or fluxbox does not equal linux.
MacOSX is a *nix, KDE runs on *nixes.
The major snag with the “airport extreme” card and it’s support is the fact that Broadcom is very close fisted with it’s code. It has nothing to do with YDL. Also, again FWIW, YDL has the best “out of the box” laptop sleep support I’ve seen.
Would someone please explain to me why they’d buy a G5 and then install linux on it? Please?
on my new shiny ibook…
The 1st cd doesn’t want to boot, and the md5sum is the right one…
I tried SourceMage, which can boot well, and mandrake 10.1, which can boot with a little openfirmware command.
But YDL stays deaf to this command…
“I wonder can you run the Apple native programs without running the entire Aqua interface?”
No – not apps requiring a GUI.
“I mean you can run an Xserver on OSX. Can you fire up Fluxbox or KDE. ”
Yes.
“Then run Apple programs without Aqua taking over the display? ”
No, but you can run KDE and Aqua at the same time.
It’s called Darwin. Just download it from http://www.opendarwin.org
At the login screen, enter > as the user name and enter no password. You can then log in in text mode.
I remember reading some article where you can have X11 start up as default. If you use darwinports or fink you can install GNOME or KDE or whatever else.
i’m seeking a solution for a firewaire installation. i’ve a 12″ powerbook with an external 160GB firewire harddisk. i don’t want to repartion my internal harddrive but would like to install the linux on my external harddisk. the yellowdog installer doesn’t seem to recognize my firewire hardware and only let me choose my internal harddisk as destination drive.
i’m sure, that anybody must have come up with a solution for this, before. but i can’t find any useful information on internet…
I got myself the YDL 4 Geek Edition the other day. It installed without much fanfare, although I was pleasantly surprised that it auto-detected MacOS and MacOS X mountpoints (previously you had to set these manually).
I admit to being a big KDE fan, and am exploring my way around 3.3 (the most recent I’d used before that was an (incomplete) 3.1 available with Fink). Everything’s there in that respect, and aside from a signal that occurs when KDevelop closes I have yet to find any distribution-specific bugs.
That is, except for 3D Graphics Acceleration and Sound, neither of which are available on the two computers (G3 iMac, G4 PowerMac) I’ve installed it on. Further, details on TerraSoft’s site suggests there is no quick fix to either of these (nVIDIA graphics cards in both cases, and apparently the OSS + ALSA ppc sound drivers could be considered at best alpha-status). They state they’re working on the sound issue at least and will make the updates available, but there isn’t one at this stage.
Bottom line? If you’re willing to go without sound (and there’s a good chance you’ll have to) and without 3D Acceleration for nVIDIA cards, YDL 4.0 does the trick. Otherwise, I’d wait until they clock up some point releases and then give it a go.
From: John Blink
Subject: @blixel
I wonder can you run the Apple native programs without running the entire Aqua interface?
(I’ll have a crack at answering this too =)
No, John. The Mac OS X window server is inextricably linked with the Mac OS X window manager (Aqua), and Mac OS X GUI applications require both in order to function. In order to run Mac OS X GUI applications, you must have Aqua present. Well, you do for the moment at least, but I don’t see that changing given Apple’s design approach to Mac OS X.
I’ve often wondered this myself (given that KDE + KWin + Konqueror has some definite advantages), but sadly I don’t think it’s to be.
Do they have logging for iptables in the kernel now?
My past experience with YDL (albeit 3.0) is that the stock kernel didn’t have CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_LOG set to either m or y. I’m not sure why, it works just fine in PPC.
I’m surprised that most people didn’t even understand what you meant. You need a lot of OS X knowledge for this, but it is possible to run GNOME on Mac OS X with its native graphics system. You have to hack the initscripts so that Finder, Dock etc. don’t start up.Note that this would not be via X11, but GTK running on Quartz (or whatever Apple calls the respective parts of their graphics system).
So what you mean IS possible, and for those that didn’t understand it, there is NO Linux, emulation or whatever involved.
Of course, the easier solution to fix the perceived slowness of Mac OS X is turning off all animations.
As already noted above, another solution could be opendarwin + X11.
Thanks for the replies.
By asking the question I was hoping maybe we could help blixel with the slowness problems mentioned, without having to go to Linux, and at the same time maintain HW support.
But why would he want another desktop environment when Aqua is gorgeous
> might as well stick with your OS X install. no support for wireless, nor true suspend.
YDL has supported wireless for quite some time. The only thing that won’t work is an Airport Extreme card — the chipset manufacturer seems to think keeping the specs secret is a good thing.
Suspend always worked well enough for me with YDL 3.0. Overall, YDL on a Powerbook or iBook is apretty slick Linux install. If you have suppifient disk space, you can configure Mac on Linux to get at your essential OS X apps from within Linux.
I’m pretty satisfied with OS X on my laptop, even though it’s a slower 1st generation iBook. But YDL is great for people looking to pep up older hardware, or who prefer a linux working environment. Terrasoft’s upcoming 64-bit HPC release should go like all hell on G5 hardware.
YDL doesn’t support sleep/Airport Extreme/3D acceleration on the Powerbook 12″. That puts in on the same footing as other “non-PPC” focused distros. It’s nice to run Linux on the Powerbook since it has some software that I’d like to use that doesn’t run on OS X. But if you want a good *laptop* experience, stick with OS X.
Baker wrote:
The major snag with the “airport extreme” card and it’s support is the fact that Broadcom is very close fisted with it’s code.
Sounds to me like it’s Apple’s fault for going with Broadcom instead or some other “less close-fisted” manufacturer.
Remember, it’s in Apple’s best interest for alt OS’s to “sorta” run on their hardware, because that sucks in some of the geek crowd. But in the end, Apple sells the “Mac experience” — i.e. their cool hardware + their cool software — and they don’t want you meddling kids showing off your Macs running GNU/Linux to prospective customers thus collapsing their carefully crafted JRDF (Jobs Reality-Distortion Field) wave function.
Julian wrote:
Of course, the easier solution to fix the perceived slowness of Mac OS X is turning off all animations.
Unfortunately, Apple does not allow that. See previous point about the JRDF.
Sounds to me like it’s Apple’s fault for going with Broadcom instead or some other “less close-fisted” manufacturer.
Instead of posting rubbish like that, do you know how many laptops in the x86 world rely on Broadcom chipsets? Lots (nearly all?) of the non-Centrino ones. Apple just went with what was readily available.
Unfortunately, Apple does not allow that. See previous point about the JRDF.
You can turn off Dock Magnification, the genie effect when minimizing apps (stupid effect anyway). What else do you want to turn off?
The UI isn’t slow or lagging on my Powerbook 12″ or iBook G3 800. Unless of course you’re referring to resizing windows.
Having left the world of Mac several years ago, it’s good to be greeted with some fresh lingo (or at least fresh to me.)
As per johnMG’s comments, does anyone know of websites that showcase which hardware manufacturers are more ‘open’ as far as working with linux goes? – (I’m guessing we’re talking the non-Apple world here.)
Personally, I didn’t understand because this is *supposed* to be a thread about YDL.
.
I know this is supposed to be about YDL and all; but @blixel can run most Linux apps (not all) by either installing Fink and using it or by compiling applications from source on the Mac; it’s not hard to get Fluxbox, KDE, OOO, KOffice, etc running in a separate virtual screen under Mac OSX (either by Fink as noted above or XDarwin). The overhead is not unbearable and the advantage is you’d be able to use Firewire and the all other Apple stuff without the lose.
I’ve currently got a boxed copy of YDL 4 sitting under my Vaio. The iBook ordered on the same day is delayed because Apple are out of stock, so I can only assume it’ll work on it well…
Personally, I didn’t understand because this is *supposed* to be a thread about YDL.
.
You are correct I am sorry.
I was trying to suggest an alternative solution to Blixel, instead of going to Linux. Blixel try the following.
OSX base. Disable aqua, then run X11/KDE/GNOME. Then he could have the responsiveness and HW support.
But the solution I proposed won’t work because you can’t run Apple apps under KDE. I would imagine they have dependencies and a full blown aqua environment would launch.
You can turn off Dock Magnification, the genie effect when minimizing apps (stupid effect anyway). What else do you want to turn off?
Animations? Well, menus have a small amount of down/up animation.
So-called “drawers” (like in Mail.app when you hit the Mailboxen “button”).
Not to mention drop shadows.
Besides animations though, my guess is that the whole darn rendering model slows things down more than anything else. Rendering the whole display, all the time, in real time, in pdf? Egads! Well-crafted bitmapped fonts look way better to my eye (i.e. the X11 fonts) and have got to be way faster. Even when the Mac *does* display fonts aliased, they still are never spaced right (though Monaco 10 isn’t too bad). The whole thing just looks mushy and blurry to me compared to nice sharp hand-crafted X11 bitmapped fonts.
As long as there’s no driver for the Airport Extreme (802.11g) under Linux I won’t install the OS. I know it’s too bad and it’s broadcom’s (the chipset maker for the AirPort) responsability to provide the driver.
:'(