[ydl-gen] Looking for advice.

[Warren Nagourney]

I have installed both YDL 6.1 and Ubuntu 8.10 on an iBook G4 800.  The  
YDL installation was completely straightforward with no problems at  
all. The Ubuntu installer script has some bugs which are easily  
rectified after a Google search, but Ubuntu has little commitment to  
the PPC architecture (though it has a vast following which partially  
compensates).

1. YDL has no installation problems that I know of.

2. Any desktop can be installed, just like any other linux  
distribution.  You might need to tweak the YUM repositories to find  
the relevant packages.

3. Again, YDL runs just about anything that all other linuxes run. An  
annoying exception is Flash, which doesn't run on the ppc  
architecture. There is a 3rd party replacement (whose performance  is,  
in my opinion, unacceptable). There are lots of apps in every category  
which run fine in YDL, though whether they are better or worse than  
commercial apps in OS X is something you need to decide. I tend to  
prefer the commercial apps, though a lot of effort has gone into  
making Open Office a decent clone (I actually run none of the office  
apps, commercial or not).

4. The installation documentation is excellent and should make it easy  
to install on your iBook.

One caveat: The graphics in PPC linux (any distro) leaves a lot to be  
desired.  The video processors are very badly supported in PPC linux -  
the GPU companies provide no drivers for ppc and the 3rd party ones  
(reverse engineered) range from very bad to barely acceptable. The  
graphics in linux doesn't compare to that in OS X. This was what  
eventually drove me to give up on linux - good video is very important  
to me, but other people might not feel that way and might find linux  
ppc graphics perfectly acceptable.

Hope this helps.

Warren Nagourney




On Feb 15, 2009, at 5:25 PM, Jason Ritzke wrote:

> My girlfriend owns a iBook G4 Mac Laptop, which, I'm sure you all  
> know is a ppc architecture system. After I switched to linux a  
> little while ago she decided it would be a great idea for her lower  
> spec'd system to move to a less beefy OS. I, for my part, have been  
> looking into it to see what would be the best option for a ppc- 
> focused linux OS that could do all the things that she needed.
>
> But before I go trying to install ydl on her system, I have a couple  
> of questions for the more experienced individuals.
>
> 1. Are there any problems which could be forseen installing ydl on a  
> G4 iBook?
>
> 2. How difficult would it be to install the xfce desktop inviroment  
> into ydl linux? Are there any reasons it might pose a problem?
>
> 3. Does ydl have any difficulty running typical software? is there  
> anything I need to look out for in the basic realm of word  
> processors, e-mail clients, and i-pod connectivity?
>
> 4. Any advice for how to best go about installing ydl?
>
>
> Thanks for your time and consideration.
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