YD 4.0

[Clinton MacDonald]

Mr. Balthazor:

Brian Balthazor wrote:
> I understood one of the benefits of linux was a
> small footprint. I was somewhat surprised to see
> the YD image is 3.6 GB.

Welcome to the wonderful world of modern, fully featured operating 
systems! ;-)

I am sure Windows XP ships on 5 or 6 CD-ROMs, at least, and Mac OS X is 
on 4 or 5 (or one multi-gigabyte DVD-ROM). We have come to expect a lot 
more from our operating systems than just a file manager and a few 
command-line formatting utilities. Many GNU/Linux distributions contain 
dozens of contributed (or commercial) programs -- browsers, games, music 
players, and so on -- that take up lots of room. And GNU/Linux has a 
reputation for choices, so multiple versions of each program might be 
made available. And when you throw in source code, things start to get 
really large!

> I've been trying to download the release from a
> number of mirror sites to no avail. I ordered the
> disk, though it has not yet arrived. Do I truly
> need to download all 3.6GB to get an image of YD
> up and running?

You can get a decent installation of Fedora RC2 in just the first two 
disks. The third CD-ROM contains "optional" items (like KDE, if I 
recall). If you are judicious in your choices of applications, you can 
get by installing from just the first two CD-ROMs (in Fedora for the PC, 
however, if you make a poor choice and select something from that third 
CD-ROM, there is no way to gracefully exit, and you must restart your 
installation :-( ).

If you are really pressed, you could possibly install YDL 4.0 without 
any of the GUI utilities. This would bring the size down to fewer than 
1-GB. Also, the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux prides itself in making 
"best of" default choices of applications. There is a Ubuntu 
distribution for PowerPC that fits on a single CD. Several folks on this 
list have spoken well of Ubuntu (no flame wars, please!). Finally, there 
is a distro called "Damn Small Linux" that is exactly what its name 
suggests. The goal of that project is to have a full GUI version of 
Linux that fits on those little "business card" sized CDs (I do not know 
whether it is available for PowerPC, and I am *sure* it is not available 
for the G5).

Good luck!

Best wishes,
Clint

-- 
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT net>