Yellow Dog Linux
I’ve been having problems with my wife’s iMac. It’s the original (1998, revision A) iMac with archaic MacOS 8.1. It crashes a lot, and I frequently have problems sharing printers to it over Appletalk from Linux (using netatalk). My wife complains about it, so I told her I was going to “upgrade” it. 
So I start checking out Yellow Dog Linux, distributed by Terra Soft. (They also own the singular license to distribute Apple hardware with Linux pre-installed.) There’s even a video on their site with a pretty girl telling me, “My computer is not just a machine, it’s a reflection of who I am,” while techno music plays in the background (image on right). Linux chicks are cool.
YDL 3.0 is based on RedHat 9.0 and it comes with Mac On Linux that allows you to run MacOS directly on the CPU from within Linux. So I downloaded the ISO images and gave it a whirl. The companion install guide for YDL is excellent. I partitioned for dual boot so I can play with MOL and also just in case I need MacOS. The install was effortless and I booted up with KDE greeting me. (I did the “workstation” install to fit it within my 3 gig partition, so maybe the “everything” option would have gotten GNOME as well.)
First, the good stuff. I actually like KDE. RedHat has it setup with the same theme and application menus, so it is very familiar. I got the applications Jen needs running, including Mozilla browser, Mozilla mail (IMAP), and Open Office. Mozilla is way better than MacOS Internet Explorer. And mad props to Open Office — so much better than Claris Works. Now I need to find a teacher’s grading application to replace her old MacOS one.
Now, some bad points.
- MacOS boots in 40 seconds. Linux boots in 125 seconds — even after I eliminated all unneeded services! Is this because Linux autodetects all hardware on every single boot-up? (But once it’s running, it’s faster, smoother, and more reliable than MacOS.)
- There is no Flash plugin for PowerPC Mozilla to view fancy web graphics. (Funny, this made me realize two things: one, that I am still running a piece of proprietary software on my desktop; two, why are we letting proprietary technology become a defacto standard on the web without a free replacement?)
- My wheel mouse does not work. Maybe this is KDE’s fault.
- My favorite e-mail client, Evolution, is just broken. I tried several configurations using IMAP and even local mbox files and I couldn’t read e-mail before it locked up.
- No graphical bootup. Minor, I know, but there’s no excuse for this anymore. I expect this in RedHat 10. I’ve seen kernel patches for this, and there are hints in the latest init scripts that this is where we are headed.
Don’t get the wrong impression though. I am very impressed with Yellow Dog Linux. I have my wife’s desktop customized for simplicity. I think she’ll find it easier to use, and best of all, things will work and not crash now.
August 25th, 2003 at 8:33 am
Woot! Glad to see that YDL worked out for you! Strange about that bootup time though. Hmmm.
Personally, I’d dump Mozilla and pickup Firebird. I’ve looked at Thunderbird as well and it seems a tad rough right now, but definitely looks like it has potential.
Linux just lacks that “Spit and Polish” that it needs to break into the more “Average Joe” user base. Can a graphical startup screen be THAT difficult? Just give a keystroke as an option to view the text bootup sequence (can be set as default) and you’ll appease(?) the geek masses.
I’ll be interested to see what you think of MacOnLinux (MOL)!!
August 25th, 2003 at 9:18 am
The slow boot time is a problem for Linux in general. With hardware running so fast now, maybe people overlook the problem, similar to how memory footprint of the desktop is overlooked. I think the kernel actually initializes pretty quickly, but all the init scripts that run take time. Why can’t some of these scripts run in parallel? There could still be dependencies, like run network first, but then kick off xinetd, cups, apache, etc in parallel.
Maybe even give the user their login prompt while a few scripts are still running, like enabling swap space. I understand the debugging value of having each task run separately on screen along with its output. But we are going to have a graphical boot soon, so log all that boot stuff, and queue events to notify the user of problems after they login (”The system was unable to initialize swap space because …” — then pop up the help browser).
I like shell scripts for simplicity and maintenance, but I wonder how much faster binary code would run? What if there were a compiler that turned the shell scripts into binaries? I think the scripts are a bit inefficient too. I noticed a lot of “sleep” commands being used in them on my RedHat system.
To be fair, my Windows 2000 desktop at work takes 2 minutes to boot also, but Linux should be better than that.