OT -Other than Yellow Dog ?

[Harvey Ussery]

Terry Houle wrote:

> Hope not to start any flames since a YDL list but though the best 
> place to post since I currently subscribe and am running it (YDL) on 
> my i Book.  Anyway my question is if anyone has tried other distro's 
> on their Mac?  I just saw a post on a Linux list about maybe Red Hat 
> more interested in server market than desktop.  Since I believe YDL is 
> based on Red Hat wondering how some other distro's might  fare on my box? 

Terry,    Don't know if it will be useful, my responding at all, since 
I've just made a beginning, but: I decided to try several other distro's 
after 3 yrs of using first RedHat & then (after I switched hardware from 
a Dell Pentium to my iMac) YDL. I did a reconfig of the whole system: 
Kept MacOSX (only--did not retain OS9) but on only about 5 1/2 gigs, 
then allotted all the rest of an 80-gig hd for playing w Linux's. First 
I reinstalled YDL on 17 1/2 gigs, and that is still my most-used & 
stable distro.

The first new distro for me is DebianPPC3.0 (Woody)--installed that on 
another 18 gigs carved out of the unallocated space. And I'm still in 
the process of getting up & running in Debian; that's why I'm not really 
a good source of info for you. However, I have had enough exp w it to 
make a few observations. My 2 biggest challenges when installing YDL3.0 
were X-config (my iMac's monitor, video card, etc were not autodetected, 
and it was a struggle getting the right X-config) & config of wireless 
(airport). That last one was an A-1 b**ch!--spent vast amounts of time 
on that.

With Debian, I had a major struggle to understand & properly config 
yaboot for dual-booting not only OSX, but 2 Linux OS's as well. Also a 
hard time getting CD-ROM drive properly config'd. But wireless was a 
snap: The installer ran the network config & said it was successful. I 
didn't believe that until I entered a URL in lynx and--wowee!--away I 
went! (Of course it was necessary to reinstall before that point so that 
I had 2.4 kernel rather than the default 2.2. If you decide to try Deb & 
have recent hardware, by all means use a 2.4 kernel--it has >much< 
better hardware support.)

I still don't have X installed--my moniter & vid card are not supported 
by the ver of XFree86 on the install cd's--I have to get ver 4.3 
installed before I can complete a config of X.

Debian seems to have much more extensive & uptodate pkgs than 
YDL--that's just an initial impression--I haven't gotten into installing 
a lot of optional pkgs as yet. So also to be seen is how using Deb pkg 
handlers like dselect & dpkg & apt-get will compare to using yum.

Debian seems to have more extensive documentation than ydl--and a lot of 
it is written in English (as opposed to geek)--but maybe, out of 
desperation, I'm just getting better at reading it.

In summary, it's hard to compare the two as yet. In some ways Debian has 
seemed new & strange; but I'm further along at this point in the process 
than I was in ydl. If you try it, let me know what you think. [BTW, I 
installed from the official 7-cd set.]

>
> I realize that YDL is probably  the distro of choice for Mac.

Don't know that that's necessarily the case. The Debian developers seem 
to have worked out a lot of the kinks for use with ppc.

Good luck!    --Harvey

>