YDL Future --revised

[Kai Staats]

Ted,

> Let me preface this by saying that I am personally interested in the
> future of PPC CBE; I will be buying a PS3 just to experiment with the
> YDL-supported development stuff. And my company will almost certainly
> enter into a strategic partnership with some CBE partner, possibly
> TerraSoft.

Appreciated.


> That said, I have to give up on the YDL 5 for Apple. The PPC machine
> I run Linux on is a trusty Pismo. It isn't my main machine, but the
> one I feel most comfortable with when creative. I had YDL 4 on it and
> was quite happy except for the fact that TerraSoft sort of abandoned
> ship on the RPMs. YDL 4 had no sound support on that machine, but it
> didn't matter to me at all. Everything else just worked.
>
> What I expected with v5 was much the same experience, plus perhaps a
> few extra refinements. I also expected KDE to be available as an
> option, though I was willing to give E17 a try. And if all went well,
> I was prepared to buy a YDL.net account to have access to the
> expected RPMs for both the Pismo personally and the company PS3.
>
> But I will be erasing v5 from my disk, going back to v4 and getting
> someone here to build the PPC RPMs I need.
>
> Why?
>
> - v5 doesn't support sleep. If you close the Pismo, the machine locks
> in a way that while it doesn't ever wake, it uses battery. v4 just
> worked. This alone makes v5 unusable for me.

v5.0 does support sleep on tested, supported models. The Pismo is the oldest 
model of the Power laptop that will run YDL v5.0. We simply cannot test nor 
support every model forever. The driver required to enable sleep on this unit 
differs from the newer PBs. I do apologize, but we have to draw the line (per 
a recent post to this list).


> - the installer is a mess. You have no options whatever. You simply
> install what TerraSoft thinks you should have and use the add/remove
> facility afterward to adjust. The only problem is that "remove" of
> even the most trivial thing is likely to remove something else
> important, forcing you to, well, start the entire process over.

Actually, the installer is very clean :) But I do understand your point. Per a 
recent post, we built YDL v5.0 for the PS3 and a VERY newbie user. For them, 
it is simple and elegant. For the rest of us, yes, a bit frustrating if we 
desire a custom install. We are working to re-insert the custom package 
function with the next release. Sounds simple, I know, but Anaconda is not a 
simple code base.


> - the Emacs (which you have to add) has almost none of the packages
> from that ecosphere.

Please explain in more detail.


> - KDE is an option. But don't be fooled. Its not the full KDE, what
> KDE considers its core suite. This is Koffice (word processor,
> spreadsheet, presenter, database, and slew of other stuff) and
> Kontact (mail, calendar, contacts, notes, news, sync). It looks like
> most but not all of Kontact is included, but NONE of Koffice.
>
> So having KDE without the core apps plus Konquerer, well, it just
> ain't KDE. Not even close. YDL 5 has neither Konqueror nor any piece
> of Koffice. Someone might miss the point here and respond that I just
> use the Microsoft Office clone, OpenOffice.

Confused. I have Konqueror installed in addition to E17. I used 'yum install' 
to do this, but I recommend the GUI Software Manager. I promise you the 
standard KDE components (as ship with Fedora) are on the DVD.


> No thanks. Not only does Kword integrate better, it is the ONLY
> framebased text editor in the open source world. Its a big
> difference, just by itself. But look how each frame can be a
> component from another KDE app. I would even have used it under E17,
> but that's not possible. No Scribus either, so no high end page
> layout.
>
> So here's what I propose to do personally. I'll probably do the whole
> bit with TerraSoft on the CBE. But for my loved Pismo, I'll go back
> to v4 and pay someone to teach me Konstruct, or go with custom
> building every week or so.

I encourage you to install the proper packages.

Sincerely,
kai