[TriLUG] Yaller Dawg...feh!

[Matt Matthews]

Well, after my gripes here last week, I've finally gotten Yellow Dog Linux 2.0
installed on my PowerMac 9500/150.

And boy does it suck. :^(

Well, that's a little harsh, but I've had all kinds of trouble getting this
working and now that it is, it is still far more frustrating than I had hoped
it would be. I'll keep going tomorrow, once I'm not so frustrated, until I
have it to a state I'm pleased with or I reach an(other) impasse.

A few points that might interest folks:

- Thanks Ben Reed for bringing his YDL 2.0 discs to the meeting this
past week and letting me have them; they've helped a lot.

- The trick to getting an older PowerMac running YDL seems to be using the
BootX MacOS extention to bootstrap a kernel to get to the install CD. I can
provide details if anyone is really interested. Newer PowerMacs (probably
starting with the beige G3 line) should boot the CD just fine. My 9500/150 has
a very old 4x Sony SCSI CD drive and the SCSI controller on the board is,
shall we say, less than stellar.

- My impressions of Linux on x86 vs. ppc: Older x86 hardware is supported very
well, but the flood of new hardware is difficult to keep up with at times so
even a new distribution may be lacking compatibility with cutting edge
consumer hardware. Older ppc hardware is not supported as well because there
are fewer developers working on it and they concentrate on making sure that
the limited new hardware coming from Apple is supported, ending up with a
situation in which new hardware is actually supported fairly well. I'm not
sure how non-Apple ppc hardware influences this difference between x86 and ppc
Linux hardware support.

It has been an interesting project, but all things considered, I am really
hoping that I can make MacOS X work on this (unsupported) hardware eventually
so that I don't have to deal with YDL. On a newer Mac, I might not be so
disappointed in YDL, but would probably still want MacOS X just for having a
terminal running tcsh running right next to a movie playing in Quicktime. ;^)

Regards,
matt

-- 
Matt Matthews     \ ph: 919.660.2859                         \ Use        _o)
Duke University    \ em: jvmatthe at math.duke.edu               \ GNU/Linux /\\
Dept. of Mathematics\ www: http://www.math.duke.edu/~jvmatthe/ \ Today   _\_V