YDL Future --revised

[Ted Goranson]

Kai-

Thanks for responding to a whiner. Mostly, my post was to inform readers.

The YDL site doesn't note that the Pismo is below the cutoff line. 
Part of my message is that it is essentially not a doable mix (Pismo 
and YDL 5) because of the sleep problem. And, er , it slept fine in 
4.1.

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

I did not note in the previous email that emacs will not run at all. 
It simply won't launch. Its a bit mysterious because unlike KDE, E17 
gives no launch feedback. It may be because it is looking for some 
Gnome package that the uninstaller firebombed when I replaced G with 
K.

But my original comment was to the lack of support for Emacs. Yes, I 
know you have to draw a line somewhere, and I'm totally fine with 
that. But for the interest of readers here, TerraSoft installs the 
vim packages by default.

Emacs by itself IS available to install. Its probable that I can get 
it working, but its a pretty lonely fellow without its classmates. If 
readers would like to see what I mean by the "Emacs ecosphere," take 
a gander at what's available to users of a competing PPC desktop 
system.

<http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=emacs&stype=all>

In particular, there's no AUCTeX in v5. Its arguably the most capable 
high end press-ready app, and since v5 ignored Scribus, it seems a 
notable omission. But that's beside my own personal interest.

I guess you have three distinct communities with completely different needs:

- the folks with old hardware that just want to have a useful OS. I 
don't suppose there is much of a business case in supporting these 
guys.

- the folks with new PS3s that want to explore. There is obviously a 
tradeoff here between easy to begin and ability to move up in power. 
I'm fine with the emphasis on easy right now.

- the folks who want to tap the power of the CBE, and who will be 
doing their exploring and development on Apples, old and new, and 
PS3s. Obviously, the advantage of having the same distro all around 
is a big deal.

For those who might not know: the PPC CBE that TerraSoft supports is 
a very big deal and already is the chip of choice for advanced 
aerospace and defense use. There are two main environments that these 
guys use. One is in the C, C++ area that IBM and TS supply aids for. 
No one working in this space can do without these.

But the real power? Well, that's likely to be in a mixed environment 
of heavy floating point operations (which the IBM and TS tools 
support) and artificial intelligence. In fact, the Steel Bank Common 
Lisp community, an open source player, has ported SBCL to the CBE. 
And they get the same comparable speeds in their domains as C++, on 
the CBE - as on other platforms.

So AI on the CBE means SBCL. And SBCL means...

Emacs. Now, sure. Anyone working at this level should be able to 
build their own tools, and likely will. Still, it would be nice if v5 
played nice, because if you require that level of effort, why choose 
the dog?

Hope this is enough elaboration.

>  > - KDE is an option. But don't be fooled. Its not the full KDE,

...snip

>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.

I apologize.

I will say, however that they do not show in the "GUI Software 
Manager," nor on the list at the TS site for "included apps."

Go here:

<http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/ydl/included/>

and do the searches, starting with Konqueror.

...snip

>I encourage you to install the proper packages.

I will probably try this, and likely buy installation support as 
installation of these packages is not painless and I'd be paying a 
support guy here instead.

Thanks, Ted

-- 
__________
Ted Goranson
Sirius-Beta