[ydl-gen] Looking for advice.

[Warren Nagourney]

The one area where commercial apps are very good is in the drawing and  
CAD area. I realize that there are perfectly decent CAD apps for  
linux, but I have not seen any with the flair and elegance of Vellum  
(very expensive) and OmniGraffle (reasonably priced).  I use Latex  
exclusively for "word processing" and admit that linux might have an  
edge there (with Kile). Data analysis is up for grabs - I am playing  
with R (in OS X) and am impressed, but it still doesn't seem to be as  
easy to use (for changing graph styles) as Igor Pro.

Stephen's experience with glxgears is impressive (I assume he uses  
Mesa): I get the same framerates on my 800 MHz iBook G4 (I seem to  
remember getting about 300 on my PS3 with no 3D acceleration).   
However, getting acceptable video is not without problems in linux.   
When I installed YDL 6.1 on my iBook, the video seemed to have no 2D  
acceleration at all. I then installed Ubuntu 8.1 and 2D acceleration  
seemed to be present with Gnome, but when I switched to Window Maker,  
the acceleration was lost (for some mysterious reason). These things  
are annoying, to say the least. Since I had access to a perfectly good  
OS which didn't have these problems, my choice was clear.

Cheers,

Warren Nagourney

On Feb 20, 2009, at 6:20 PM, Stephen Harker wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a somewhat different perspective from Warren, though I agree
> with some of his comments.
>
>> 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).
>
> Personally I find flash to be of no interest.  But this is very much a
> minority viewpoint these days.
>
>> 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).
>
> I have had little use for most commercial applications.  I mainly use
> TeX (I prefer to use the TeXLive distribution and install that
> myself).  For creating graphics, plots and such I have mostly used
> gnuplot (4.2.3 as of the moment), R and xfig.  I have made limited use
> of ImageMagick and gimp for photo type graphics.  For most other needs
> I largely am using self-compiled, often self-written, data analysis
> programs.  For this the supplied compilers are adequate.  I would like
> a later gfortran (and gcc generally) than the supplied 4.1.2.  I
> notice there are packages such as: spu-gcc43-4.3.2-2.ppc.rpm supplied,
> but have not investigated them further.
>
>> 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.
>
> In general accelerated X11 should be available, but there seems to be
> a problem with the supplied kernel.  From memory some form of
> accelerated X11 has been available since around 2002 for r128, for the
> later radeon the availability has varied, but all bar the latest
> iBooks (late 2005 with ATI Technologies Inc M11 NV [FireGL Mobility
> T2e] (rev 80)) have been well supported since 2005!  This accelerated
> X11 support may not be up to Apple's Quartz, but was quite
> reasonable.  People with 2004 iBooks had accelerated X11 since YDL4.0,
> I remember a colleague with a 2004 iBook who was really pleased when
> 4.0 came out as it enabled a big improvement in graphics performance.
> However, he had problems with YDL6.1 graphics performance until he
> compiled his own kernel (linux-2.6.27.8 worked for him as it had for
> me).
>
> With my late 2005 iBook it has not been since much later
> kernels and Xorg releases that accelerated X11 has been available.  In
> terms of YDL, the 6.0 release had a limited accelerated X11, but the
> big improvement came with YDL6.1 with a self-compiled kernel
> (linux-2.6.27.8 again).  With my current kernel and a standard window
> for glxgears I get:
>
> glxgears
> 5127 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1025.024 FPS
> 5325 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1064.919 FPS
> 4699 frames in 5.0 seconds = 939.784 FPS
> 5687 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1137.294 FPS
> 5076 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1014.211 FPS
> 5157 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1031.296 FPS
>
> -- 
> Stephen Harker                           s.harker at adfa.edu.au
> PEMS
> UNSW at ADFA
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