Fred Laxton writes
Here's my little story of my new experience with Apple hardware and YDL ...

I bought a Titanium PowerBook G4 550 with 512 MB RAM in January 2002 (my first Mac), because I wanted a machine that could run Linux and OS X. After evaluating notebooks for web design and general programming, I concluded that the PB was the best notebook on the market, bar none. When Apple dropped the price, I snapped one up. After five months of living with this machine, I still feel the same way about the hardware.

I've been running Mandrake Linux 8.x for more than a year on a beefed up PC (768 MB RAM, dual monitors, 200 GB disk space, etc.), so that was my reference point for comparison to the PowerBook.

I tried installing YDL 2.1, SuSE PPC 7.3, LinuxPPC and Mandrake PPC 8.2 beta (and final). None were able to set up the video properly (this PB has the relatively new ATI Radeon video card), some wouldn't even install, and none would set up booting properly.

I instead used OS X for a couple of months. I found OS X beautiful, interesting, slow, and a hodge-podge of Mac OS, BSD, Linux - confusing and frustrating. I had lots of trouble installing packages that install easily on Linux. Some I had to compile from source. Quite a few never did work. I mainly used X Windows (rootless), FINK software, OSXGNU packages, and others. OpenOffice.org still doesn't work there. A real mess.

When YDL 2.2 ISO images were posted to your site, I downloaded and tried it. I found your video setup guide really helped me, as I didn't really understand the Linux boot setup process on the Mac with open firmware and Yaboot. I reformatted the drive to set up triple boot, installed OS 9 and OS X, and finally YDL 2.2. It installed very easily, and set up everything really nice. I had to manually set up my Apple Aircard wireless 802.11b NIC, but it works great, too. The only thing that doesn't work is the PCMCIA card slot with my 1 GB Microdrive. I think the 2.4.19 kernel plus ide-cs support should fix that. Maybe YDL 2.3 will have this included. I may compile my own kernel with ide-cs support turned on ;-)

With Yellow Dog Linux, the PowerBook screams now! No more spinning cursor like OS X. It's faster than my PIII 866 desktop with 768 MB RAM running Mandrake. I'm loving using KDE, Mozilla, Evolution, Open Office, Real Player, Xemacs, XMMS, Everybuddy, etc. While I can run OS 9 or OS X, I rarely boot into them. Oh, and Mac-on-Linux works great!

Once I got it working, I promptly ordered YDL 2.2 on CD, along with a couple of T-shirts and a mouse pad. I wear my YDL shirts around town, and especially to the meeting of our local Linux Users Group ;-)

Keep up the great work!

Regards,
Fred

Back to the Index