YDL off the cutting edge

[Rick Thomas]

Ray,

It's unlikely you will ever be able to boot YDL on an OldWorld mac 
*directly* from CD.  You can't do that now with 3.0 or 3.0.1.  It's 
technically possible to build a bootable Linux CD for OldWorld 
machines, but there are licensing issues that make it legally 
difficult.  So I'll venture to predict that you'll never see such a 
thing from TeraSoft, or most likely any other Linux distributor.

That said, it's not difficult to get Linux running on OldWorld Mac 
hardware.  The recommended (by me -- others are of different religions) 
way is with a small MacOS-9 (or MacOS-8) partition and the "BootX" 
extension.   Email me if you need instructions on how to do this.

As far as getting YDL 4.0 running on OldWorld machines:  As I 
understand it, the issue is that the kernel and initial-ramdisk on the 
4.0 CD are missing one or more drivers necessary for OW Macs.  There 
has been some work by folks on this list to compile a kernel&modules 
with the necessary stuff, but I'm not sure what degree of success 
they've had.  Anybody want to comment?

Rick

PS: It seems likely that the YDL4.0 installer is unaware of the OW 
hardware quirks and may have problems with it as well.  I seem to 
recall that the installer gave the TerraSoft folks fits when they were 
developing 4.0, so it's a safe bet that it will take a bit of work to 
get it to play nice on an OW machine.  Again, anybody want to comment 
on this?



On Jan 30, 2005, at 5:09 AM, R. Hirschfeld wrote:

> For anyone from TerraSoft on the list, will security updates and the
> like be backported to YDL 3.0.1 or has support for that version
> essentially stopped?
>
> I have an Old World machine (Wallstreet PowerBook) and I'm try to
> decide whether to stick with YDL (which I'd prefer) or switch to
> another distribution.
>
> Alternatively I can hold out until YDL 4.1 (or 4.0.1) is released on
> CD if it will include a kernel that will run on an Old World machine
> (my understanding--please correct me if I'm wrong--is that 4.0 does
> not but that it is relatively easy to include this).  I realize that
> TerraSoft has dropped official support for Old World machines but I
> can handle the setup myself if I can at least boot the installer from
> the CD using the kernel and ramdisk supplied.  Will that be possible
> with the next release?  Is there a tentative timeframe yet for this?
>
> Thanks,
> Ray