YDL 4.0 on oldworld mac

[Geert Janssens]

Hi,

This week I updated YDL 3.0 to 4.0 on an oldworld G3 with the help of 
Eddie Bindt's wonderful YDL4-on-ANS-howto and a lot of elbow greese.

For those interested in testing it out the howto's at:
http://www.shiner.info/?manuals/ANS-from-3-to-4.html

A recompiled kernel for oldworld macs at:
http://www.shiner.info/?files/Yellow%20Dog%20Linux%204/kernel/

Note that this kernel lacks support for the BMAC ethernet chip which is 
used in G3's. Since I have another network card, for me this is no 
problem. Others may have to recompile first.

I'm not going to write a complete upgrade howto because I don't really 
have a stock system (lots of selfcompiled RPMs), and I did have some 
specific issues of which I don't know wether they are general for 
oldworld or not.

I would however like to share my first impressions on the new YDL.

In order to perform an upgrade as per the howto, I had to remove the 
selfcompiled gimp-print-2.4.7. So far, I haven't recompiled it yet.

After the full upgrade, my system didn't want to start kde, complaining 
it couldn't find libqt-mt.so.3, although this one was installed. It 
turns out that /etc/ld.so.conf was not updated. There was a 
ld.so.conf.rpmnew, containing the right path to qt-3.3.3, apparently put 
there by the update, but using that one did not work either, because 
several other paths in the original ld.so.conf were needed too. So the 
easiest was to edit the existing ld.so.conf manually, and then running 
ldconfig.

After that, KDE was running fine.

As often happens when changing kernels from the benh branch to the ydl 
branch, the ethernet adapters changed addresses once more. My previous 
eth0 became eth1 and vice versa. I had to edit my /etc/modprobe.conf to 
reflect these changes.

I did do some manual cleanup using rpm -qa --last. Apparently there are 
a number of RPMs installed by 3.0 that are no longer part of 4.0. Until 
now, the system doesn't seem to miss those. But if someone knows more 
about the purpose of following rpms, I'm glad to learn:
libunicode
librsvg
soup
comps

Withing KDE, most seemed to work fine. I was pleased to see that GnuCash 
was upgraded to 1.8.9, The Gimp to 2.0.4, there were updates of Anjuta 
IDE, Quanta Plus and a number of other tools I use frequently.

On the other hand, I was a bit disappointed to find out that neither 
Firefox nor Thunderbird were part of the distribution. Instead Mozilla 
1.7 is shipped. I'm sticking to the Freshrpms version of Firefox then, 
although it's not really up to date. In the long run, I will probably 
replace Thunderbird with either Kontact or Evolution. Silly thing is, 
neither seem to be aware of Thunderbird, so importing my messages and 
addresses will be a tedious task.

Next, chapter sound. As was expected, it's a bit of a mess:

1. Arts still complains that /dev/dsp is busy, but it continues using 
the null device.

2. Alsa won't work. Instead I set the default output device to OSS in 
teh control panel. Trying the testsound there, it starts and ends 
recognizable as a sound, but in between is a long hiss. Not so good.

3. Anyway, XMMS, KCD, NoAtun all produce sound normally, as does the 
system bell. But not KDE's system sounds. Those are distorted.

4. Then I was in for an unpleasant surprise: I couldn't find a way to 
play an mp3. The newly installed XMMS refused, noatun refused, no 
program could be found to play an mp3 ?! It is apparently Redhat's 
decision to remove all mp3 support from their distribution, since they 
fear licencing issues. To solve this, I had to
- remove xmms again
- download the source rpm from the xmms homepage (www.xmms.org)
- build and install

This way, at least xmms could play mp3's.



Video output had changed to 16bit default, instead of 24bit. I'm 
wondering if anaconda has anything to do with this.

That's it so far. Still on my list is getting printing to work again. If 
there's anything specific about it, I'll mention it here as well.

I would conclude that, although it's a bit of a rough ride, you CAN 
upgrade to YDL 4 on an oldworld mac. No doubt, a clean install using the 
kernel mentioned above would be much more straightforward.

Enjoy,

Geert Jan