Why YDL? Why Linux? Why YDL instead of OS X?

[B. Charles Reynolds]

On Saturday, February 8, 2003, at 05:45 AM, rjgoos@ydl.net wrote:

> Perhaps an odd set of questions.  I belong to a small Mac club, and 
> the members
> know I'm fooling around with YDL on an old PM 7200, so I imagine it's 
> only a
> matter of time before I'm asked to demonstrate YDL at a club meeting.
>
> I'm sure I'd be asked...why mess around with YDL, since OS X is now 
> BSD-based?
> I've got one answer:  runs on several pre-G3 machines...but what else 
> could I
> offer?  Why would anyone use YDL, for example, on an iMac, since OS X 
> is
> available?

I installed YDL on my iBook (white 600MHz G3) because I recently 
changed professions and no longer make a salary large enough to 
continue to pay licensing fees for commercial software that has free or 
dirt cheap equivalents for Linux, but not OSX or Classic. I also needed 
compatibility with the NIS network at work. I have not been able to get 
NIS to work correctly under OSX or Classic but it was easy to set up 
under Linux.

I still have OSX on the iBook, but I use YDL much more. I think the 
only reason I haven't wiped OSX is because I haven't spent the time to 
learn how to get Linux/OSX filesharing to work. Sure, I can probably do 
it via samba, but OSX samba support is pretty bad; for some reason, I 
can't seem to get rid of the login issues to access samba shares. So I 
keep OSX on it to be able to do file swapping between the iBook and my 
iMac which does not (yet) have YDL on it.

Come to think of it, I ought to go ahead and erase my iMac HDD and 
install Linux. Every other machine on my home network is either Linux 
or NetBSD and OSX plays nice only with the router/firewall (Pentium 75, 
16 RAM, two NICs, floppy drive, power supply, no hard drive, no 
keyboard, no mouse, no monitor or even video card and the floppy drive 
is only ever accessed on the very rare re-boot).

I'm even considering that my next computer should _not_ be a Mac 
because of these problems. I'll probably get an IBM, Sun or SGI just 
because I won't have to mess with OSX.

__
~ Charles

"One OS to rule them all; one OS to find them; one OS to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them."
	- Microsoft