Review: Yellow Dog Linux 2.2

First of all, I would like to thank TerraSoft for providing me with a free review copy of Yellow Dog Linux 2.2. is currently the only PowerPC distribution that does not exist for other platforms. Although YDL is based on RedHat, it's a unique distribution and it's understandable that each release of YDL is followed with great interest by the PowerPC Linux community. This review will take a close look at their latest and greatest.

My usual work machine is a May 2001 iBook and as many iBook users will remember, previous version of Yellow Dog Linux have been hard to cope with on this machine, so I was eager to know whether the situation had improved.

So I put CD 1 into my CD drive and booted right of it. After a few seconds, yaboot came up with a choice of install kernels. I simply opted for the default GUI install as most users will probably do. The graphical installation program came up without trouble and I chose to go for a detailed, expert install.

The installer didn't change much since YDL 2.1. It's simple but robust and very intuitive. Users shouldn't find any problems going through the install process, although they will have to specify a series of options, such as the keyboard layout, time zone, and so on. One new option I noticed was the ability to enable accelerated graphics for the XFree 4.2 UI server. This will come in handy for all those that need more graphics power for OpenGL.

The install went fine, without any trouble, I selected a Home/Office install and YDL packages got installed in about a quarter of an hour. The boot loader also got setup fine, giving me the option to specify boot entries for MacOS 9 and MacOS X. My DHCP network also got detected without any trouble. One small problem I had was with the keyboard setup. There was no entry for my Swiss French keyboard, so I stuck with the US layout for the install, hoping to fix that once YDL was installed.

The machine rebooted and the boot loader came up, launching YDL after a few seconds. Services all came up fine and I soon was presented a graphical login screen. After entering my user name and password, KDE 2.2.2 came up, whose looks disappointed me a bit. Indeed, the default setup TerraSoft chose seemed a bit ugly to me. But well, that's a personal opinion and things like fonts or the background can easily be changed to one's personal taste.

So I looked a bit through the KDE Menu to see what tools YDL provided next to the default KDE ones for configuring the distribution. The one that hit my eye at once was the Keyboard setup tool. So I launched it and was happy to find a fr_CH layout in the list. Before relaunching the GUI, I decided to check whether the accelerated graphics would work as expected. So I opened a terminal and was surprised to see that glxgears was stuck at 70 fps, indicating that no hardware acceleration was being used. After taking a look at the log files, I found out that the installer had configured 15 bit graphics instead of 16 bit. I changed that and relaunched the GUI. The acceleration worked now, but only for a few seconds, after which the screen went blank, the system had crashed beyond recovery. I guess that this is actually a problem with the kernel, so I suggest to keep hardware acceleration disabled for the moment.

After the system was back up, and DRI disabled, I checked back on my keyboard layout. It had indeed been changed to the correct one now, and I could type all the normal characters like expected. However, I have found myself completely unable to type any characters not printed on the keys. You have to understand that on a lot of non US keyboards, special characters like @, [, ], , |, {, }, etc. are obtained by pressing a combination of keys, usually alt-key or alt-shift-key. But that mechanism does not work in YDL and thus most of the non US keyboards are rendered completely useless for any normal use. This is of course a grave problem, and you better had not use YDL 2.2 with a non US keyboard until a fix is available. I reported the problem and the YDL Developer Team is working on it.

Next things I checked was my internal modem and the sound. The modem did at first not work. Indeed, the installer had not set up the /dev/modem file and thus the dialer programs could not find the modem. After I manually selected /dev/ttyS0 as modem device and played a bit with the pre and post init settings, it worked though. It is know that iBook modems are a bit difficult, but TerraSoft could have tried harder working around it, or at least document the manual steps for unexperienced users.

I then launched XMMS, and tried to play an Mp3 file, to find out that no sound came out of my speakers. The PPC sound driver was loaded though and the volume set to maximum. I soon found out that the problem was due to a bad configuration of xmms, which tried to use a sound output driver that is known not to work on PPC (not very tricky for a PPC only distribution!).

While fiddling a bit more with the installed software, I also found that some of the YDL configuration tools simply crash when launched, this included the Services configuration and the Monitor/Graphics configuration tool. If you have used YDL before, you may also know that it has a remarquable, simple tool to keep your system up to date, called Yup!. I thought to myself that maybe some of the packages had already been updated and would fix some of the problems I had encountered so far, so i decided to go for a "yup update". But all it replied was "Error:". So I tried a "yup list", "Error:". "yup check", "Error:". A "yup clean all" finally did something without replying "Error:". But as I tried to set it up again (all download mirrors had been lost) with a "yup config mirror", all it returned was a "404 http error followed by a flood of Python errors). Maybe Yup! needs to be Yup!ed?

I finally decided to take a look at Gnome 1.4 which comes with YDL 2.2. So I exited KDE and selected Gnome from the popup menu and logged back in. And suddendly, YDL did look a lot more beautiful. I am a rigid KDE user, but I have to admit that the Gnome setup as provided with YDL 2.2 looks very appealing. If you don't like the way KDE looks in YDL 2.2, make sure to take a look at Gnome, it really is a serious alternative.

Another little feature I liked a lot is the fact that they included PBButtons for the portable Macs such as the iBook or the PowerBook. It allows you to use the hotkeys on the keyboard to change sound volume, brightness or eject the CD tray. Each action is then accompanied by a nice graphical feedback.

Yellow Dog Linux 2.2 is mainly an update release, thus it comes with the latest foundations such as KDE 2.2.2, Gnome 1.4, Kernel 2.4.18, XFree86 4.2.0. I was also glad to see the installer finally works fine on the iBook. However, you may have noticed that YDL is still a huge leap away from being the perfect distribution. The amount of kinks encountered is rather high for an update release.

Nonetheless, except for the keyboard troubles, everything can be fixed in rather easy steps and once you took the time to fix them, YDL 2.2 is a viable distribution. So unless you have a non US keyboard, YDL is certainly worth to be considered, especially as the $30 price tag for the CD retail version is rather low. I can especially recommend YDL 2.0 or 2.1 users to upgrade to the new version.

The problems encountered are comprehensible considering the fact that TerraSoft is a small company with few test machines and that only few people work on Yellow Dog Linux (compared to larger teams other distributions can rely on). They certainly do their best to deliver you a great Linux experience. Maybe they should just extend their testing period a bit next time to avoid problems like those I encountered.