Eric Cohen writes
Here's the story ... well, not much to tell.

Maclovers.org is my own little mac advocacy/news site. We are a mac household though, the family has a total of 2 PowerBooks, 2 iBooks, a couple of old PPC boxes (7500, 7100). Then of course my passion is *nix so I we also have 2 Sparc 10's and an Ultra 80 making up our homelab ... and of course the kids have the dreaded m******soft PC's cuz "that's where the good games are dad".

I work as a senior network security engineer for a very large U.S. bank. As you can imagine that involves a lot of investigation time on the web. Since I don't want to use the corporate internet connection for that (why advertise our IP when investigating possible sources of abuse?) I use my old mac PowerBook and a dialup to anISP.

My problem was that to get the good tools working (nmap, nessus, snort, etc),I required a *nix platform. I originally used LinuxPPC, but it was in it'sinfancy and had too many issues. I got really excited when OSX came out, I got into the early betas stayed with it up until 10.2. To use the tools I wanted I needed Xfree, so I loaded up Xdarwin and related items as well. [However] my Wallstreet PB was the oldest PowerBook on the supported list and was never truly supported. [W]e needed to use an open source driver to get wireless cards to work on non-airport enabled macs ... serial ports were not supported, and none of the video acceleration was supported (no Quartz). I had video issues (no screen lighting after sleep), the modem was only seen on 1/3rd of the boots, the rest of the time it didn't think I had one.

I gave up, loaded OS9 back up, and was going to relegate the powerbook to an email and web surfing machine for one of the kids. For whatever reason I decided to go check out LinuxPPC again ... found they were no longer around. A friend recommended YDL. The rest is history.

Since my last note I've installed most of the extra goodies I was looking for (amaya, four different web browsers, some web investigation tools, etc). Ithen fired up apt-get to update everything ... flawless. My first and main operating system has always been solaris, but I'm thinking now I'd really be happy to see YDL for the ultrasparcII :).

One great point to get across to the masses is that as great as Linux is, it's better on the PPC platform. I have a fancy new top of the line 1.2GHz notebook provided by the bank ... I use it for the outlook email and that's it. My old PowerBook with YDL runs circles around that intel box (even when I boot the intel into linux). RISC wins every time.

Thanks again guys --Eric

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