Yellow Dog Linux-Installation
From Grokdoc
A bit about Yellow Dog, by Terra Soft:
Yellow Dog Linux came from the need for a RedHat-like distribution of Linux for the PowerPC architecture. There was and still is a port of RedHat to PPC, but it is not very good. Yellow Dog is much better.
Like RedHat, Yellow Dog is, of course, RPM-based. This allows an easy installation of packages for your installation.
Many have contested the usefulness of having Yellow Dog when you can simply run Mac OS X. There are many reasons for running Yellow Dog. The first and foremost is that Yellow Dog, as long as it has enough space, and most importantly, enough RAM, can run on Macintoshes that do not meet Mac OS X's requirements. Thus, it useful for anyone who needs a POSIX environment on their Mac, still needs to run Mac programs, but can't use Mac OS X for whatever reason.
Wait, you say. Yellow Dog can run Mac applications?
Well yes, with a little help from Mac-on-Linux, or MOL. MOL enables users of PPC linux to run the Mac OS in a window. Because this is NOT emulating a different architecture, almost everything that is run inside MOL on Yellow Dog runs at an acceptable speed. It's not a perfect solution, of course, but still a very good one.
Installation is relatively easy, especially if your machine is a New World Macintosh (one with Open Firmware). In place of the Intel BIOS, Macintoshes use Open Firmware for deciding what to do at boot time. What operating system to boot, for example, is stored there.
The problem comes when you try to use Linux with pre-USB Macintoshes, ones with no Open Firmware. Fortunately, you can still use Yellow Dog.
What you have to do on Old World Macs is use the Mac OS as a bootloader. Older Macs can boot and only boot the Mac OS and nothing else side by side, so Yellow Dog comes with a Mac OS 9 system extension that presents a dialogue box during the boot process to allow the user to choose to either continue the Mac OS boot process, or halt it and load the Yellow Dog kernel instead. It's a hack, but it works.
In other Mac Linux distributions, like m68k Debian Linux, there isn't even a dialogue box at boot. You have to completely load the Mac OS, then run a program called something like "Boot Debian," which will then kill off some of the Mac OS and load the Debian kernel.
All in all, since Yellow Dog has Mac OS X as a competitor instead of Windows, it has a very niche market. Still, I'd say that if you're interested enough in Linux, definitely give it a shot.
--Eoban
eoban.com apple-x.net
