YDL 4 on TiPB, Quicksilver, Pismo, and ALPB15

[Gavin Hemphill]

Well, I'm sorry to have to report that YDL 4 final seems to be worse 
off than YDL 4 RC3 on almost all of the platforms in the subject line.  
On the TiPB, the Quicksilver and the Pismo the graphical installer 
worked with RC3 but fails to work with YDL4 final.  With the TiPB and 
the Pismo, X worked "out of the box" on RC3, but fails on both machines 
with YDL4 final.  Using the X config files from the RC3 install got X 
working on the TiPB and the Pismo.  X didn't work right away with the 
Quicksilver with RC3 but by replacing the fb driver with the radeon one 
and a few other minor adjustments it did eventually work, porting the 
working RC3 X config file over to the YDL 4 final does not work on the 
Quicksilver after a YDL4 final install which at the moment leaves me 
really puzzled.  On the AlPB15 the graphical install didn't work for 
either RC3 or 4 final.  I still haven't gotten X working on that 
machine with 4 final.

All of the installs were done "from scratch" formatting the partitions 
etc.

At least Terrasoft had the courtesy, with the RCx releases, to give a 
bugzilla url which could be used to report bugs.  I note that there is 
no such url given for YDL4 final, and in the brief exchange I had with 
Owen Stampflee I didn't get a sense that there would be one.  It would 
be really nice to see a bug reporting system available for YDL 4 since 
I've already got a list of things that need reporting and fixing.

One note of warning for those with Quicksilver or similar towers with 
PCI SCSI cards in them.  You will have to remove the cards to install 
and run YDL4.  It would appear that the Apple SCSI PCI card, and the 
two Adaptec Mac PCI cards I have all cause the 2.6 kernel supplied with 
YDL 4 to hang.  It's really annoying that Terrasoft insists on building 
the Adaptec 7xxx module into the kernel rather than as a module.  
Modules are your friend, and make figuring things out so much easier.  
I've rebuilt the kernel to make the low level SCSI drivers as modules 
and can verify that the work arrounds that used to allow the cards to 
be used with later 2.4 series kernels are no longer viable.  If you 
don't load the modules the kernel I built runs fine with the PCI cards 
installed :-) I have no answer yet on getting PCI SCSI cards to work 
with the YDL 2.6 kernel, and I'll be querying the responsible driver 
maintainer about the problems.  I should note that I've had problems 
with Adaptec drivers on some of my X86 based Fedora, SuSE, and Mandrake 
2.6 based boxes as well.  It would appear that by default the Adaptec 
7xxx driver gets installed on those distributions even if the card in 
the machine is a 79xx model.

One good thing to note is that the install (in text mode) of YDL 4 
final is almost 6 times as fast as the graphical install in RC3.

	G++