[yellowdog-announce] Terra Soft Ships Bootable Linux iPods, FireWire drives: Press Release 9 March 2005

[yellowdog-announce at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

TERRA SOFT SHIPS LINUX ON iPODS, FIREWIRE DRIVES

Loveland, Colorado -- 9 March 2005 -- Terra Soft Solutions(R), Inc., the 
leading developer of integrated PowerPC Linux solutions, is pleased to 
announce support for bootable iPods and FireWire drives, both immediately 
available from Terra Soft with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed.

A bootable iPod or FireWire drive contains a full installation of Yellow Dog 
Linux which can be used as an external, bootable drive. All applications, 
data, and /home directory information is contained in this palm-sized medium, 
offering an unprecedented level of portability as users can boot G4 and G5 
Apple computers from the iPod or FireWire drive, leaving internal drives 
untouched.

Bill Mueller, Terra Soft software engineer states, "While the goal of this 
project was to simply enable bootable FireWire, I took it one step further 
and incorporated Anaconda, a patched 'parted', and a clever partition resize 
tool. I just couldn't put the project down. I wanted to be able to install 
directly to my iPod from the Yellow Dog Install CDs ... now you can do just 
that."

Terra Soft has created a hybrid Yellow Dog Linux v4.0.1 #1 Install CD that 
incorporates the changes required to install to an iPod or FireWire drive 
from the graphical installer. This hybrid is immediately available through 
YDL.net Enhanced accounts at http://www.ydl.net/.

"Since the day Apple first incorporated FireWire support we have been asked to 
enable Yellow Dog to install to a FireWire drive. While we would have gladly 
made this happen sooner, it was in fact a substantial challenge not easily 
completed. Now complete, no longer does one need to reformat an internal 
drive, reinstall OSX, and then Yellow Dog. With bootable external devices or 
the ability to resize an internal drive without reformat, Yellow Dog Linux 
just became a far more flexible, even more powerful OS," offers Kai Staats, 
co-founder & CEO.

Now available from the Terra Soft on-line Store are iPods and LaCie brand 
external FireWire drives with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed: 
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/store/

Staats continues, "Consider an iPod or pocket FireWire drive the most portable 
Linux workstation in the world. If there are Macs at your destination, you 
need only bring your drive and cable, reboot the borrowed computer, hold the 
Option key, and go. It's simple. It's fast. And it just works."

Terra Soft thanks Bill Fink for his original work that laid the foundation for 
bootable PowerPC Linux FireWire drives, and Guillaume Knispel for the 
partition resize tool which became integral in this solution.


About Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
Terra Soft is a leading Integrated Solutions Provider with proven expertise in 
the PowerPC architecture and Linux OS platform. As an Apple Authorized 
Proprietary Solutions Provider and IBM Business Partner, Terra Soft provides 
turnkey and build-to-order portables, desktop workstations, application and 
network servers, and HPC clusters. Terra Soft's Y-HPC 64-bit OS and cluster 
construction suite is widely accepted as the preferred platform for Xserve 
clusters.

For more information, visit www.terrasoftsolutions.com

IBM and PowerPC are registered trademarks of International Business Machines 
Corporation. Apple and iPod are registered trademarks of Apple Computer. All 
other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of their respective 
owners.