YDL 3.0 - first impressions

[Stephen Hocking]

I'm currently in the process of porting work's seismic processing package to 
run on Apple Xserves running YDL, so I snarfed a copy of 3.0 from there and 
tried it out on my 2002 iBook. I had previously installed 2.3 on this machine, 
but that version didn't support 3D acceleration, so when Apple's OSX X11 
started to do 3D acceleration and got a bit faster, I was spending most of my 
time using fink to get what I needed in OSX.

The first time I tried installing 3.0, I stuffed up the X configuration and 
didn't tell it I had a generic 1024x768 LCD. It would've been nice if it had 
been detected and come up as the default. The 2nd install, once I'd worked 
this out, went well.

It looks quite spiffy, with all the anti-aliased fonts and KDE 3.1. I
had only set 3GB aside for linux, so didn't install more packages. I'm
impressed with the speed so far - this thing screams along. Having 3D
acceleration is nice, I compiled up quakeforge and it goes as fast as
you would expect with a Radeon M6. My gripe thus far is about the sound -
the device driver doesn't support mmaped I/O or being opened O_RDWR. This
is pretty minor, as I can work around it having the source.

The vncviewer stuff integrated into KDE is pretty decent. I use VNC a lot to 
manage sessions at home and at work on my main desktop machines. The utility 
to configure the wireless card is pretty cut and easy to use. I've been doing 
a bit of software development on it and most of the sort of thing that I do 
just works. I expect that as I do more at work on the Xserves I'll continue to 
find out more, but so far I'm rather happy. For what it's worth, I'll be 
repartitioning my hard drive soon to give more space to YDL.


	Stephen

-- 

 "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" - Bertrand Russell