It is almost two months since Yellowdog Linux 4.0 was first released, at the end of September, after a long wait.
It is now downloadable free of charge for everyone from the Yellowdog mirrors or via BitTorrent or you can purchase it from the TerraSoft store: it is available, as it was for version 3.0, in the Geek edition for $29.95. With this edition you get the essential: 4 binaries CD's and 4 source CD's, no manuals. Or you can get the full edition (with manuals and a nice package), whose price starts at $59.95 without support.

I downloaded the ISO images from one of their European mirrors and gave it a try. It was long time since I last used YellowDog Linux. And the last box i ran it on was a 266 Mhz Beige G3, an OldWorld Apple machine that felt too much slow under Mac OS X 10.0 (just try to imagine how slow: first Mac OS X version ever and a 266 Mhz box. YellowDog, in that case, just brought my G3 to new life.

Public reaction to this release seemed to me a bit “cold”: I remember quite well that around the 3.0 release it was possible to breathe pure enthusiasm in the mac-linux-users community. Yellowdog has been for years, in my opinion, the easiest and nicest PPC Linux port for Desktop and less experienced users. My experience with it in a server environment was good too: our first server at ppcnerds.org was Yellowdog 2.3 powered and we were happy customers of the 3.0 version.

In the meantime Red Hat has discontinued its free desktop-oriented distribution and the Fedora community supported project took its place. Analogously, YellowDog became a Fedora PPC port and this 4.0 version is in sync with Fedora Core 2 (while Core 3 is coming out these days).

Supported hardware

New World Apple machines, including G5 (liquid cooling system is not supported yet, but a kernel errata sporting support for it should come soon, matter of days), OldWorld machines (G3 beige and Power Macintosh), Genesi's Pegasos and Pegasos II boards.

Installation

The installation is smooth. The Anaconda installer is getting better and better. Together with Ubuntu, Yellowdog seems the only distribution that has no problems at all with the nVidia GeForce 2 graphic card we have on our test Apple box. This means that at the yaboot prompt we had only to press enter to start the standard graphical installer. Yaboot will prompt you with some other options: kernels for G5, install-text and install-safe (for hardware not completely supported). The default kernel is Linux 2.6.8.1 (it was the latest stable when this YDLversion was released).

The Anaconda installer starts and you're welcomed by a nice and easy to use GUI that includes, step after step, a useful on-line help guiding the user through the installation procedure. The installation will take you some minutes, just few answers are needed and it is even more easy if you choose to one of the available installation profiles, which are personal desktop, workstation and server. Obviously you have the opportunity to choose each package with a custom installation and even if you choose a pre-configured profile, as I did, you are given a last opportunity later to customize the installation. I chose the personal desktop profile.

Partitioning a hdd can be achieved by using an automatic partitioning scheme or manually with DiskDruid. The latter is what I used during this test and i am fully satisfied with it: it is easy really easy to use and it works fine. The only filesystem option for the fresh-made partitions was ext3 and i was surprised with this, as reiser and xfs work nice on other PPC distributions using the same kernel version and I expected YDL to have those filesystems as options at install-time.

Few more minutes to setup networking (along with a firewall, if you want) and the root password and then you're presented with another opportunity of customizing the set of packages that will be installed. I chose to install Gnome 2.6 along with the default desktop environment, KDE 3.3.

Some other featured packages: OpenOffice 1.1.1, Xorg server 6.6, gcc 3.3.3, gimp 2.0.4, Mac On Linux (that will let you run a Mac OS X or Mac OS 9 virtual machine under Linux), Apache 2.0.50, Postfix 2.0.18, MySql 3.23.

Packages installation was quite fast, and yaboot bootloader installation automatically detected a Mac OS X partition too: everything is in place for the first reboot.

Part of the system configurations were moved to a second stage installer that starts right after the first boot. Few steps here too, just to configure your timezone, to change Xorg settings if needed (in my case it was not necessary), to add a new user to the system, to configure sound and to install additional packages.

Screenshots, more to come.