Yellow Dog Linux 6.0 on an iBook G4

I was excited to hear about the release of Yellow Dog Linux 6 a couple months ago - I have an iBook G4 that I've been eager to switch to Linux. Since Apple switched to Intel a couple years ago, the number of Linux distros supporting PPC has dropped off fast. Before that, Yellow Dog was focused on providing Linux on Apple hardware - now their focus has shifted to the Playstation 3, although they continue to support PPC based Apple hardware. I put off installing it for quite a while, since I couldn't find a single review of YDL 6 on Macs - only PS3. Their Mac community has shrunk considerably looking at their forums - most new posts are focused on the PS3. So, here's a brief run down of my experience installing YDL 6.0:

The install process is quite painless - since it's Red Hat based, the anaconda installer is quite easy to follow. I initially only installed the Enlightenment desktop environment, but after getting annoyed trying to configure E17 I installed Gnome as well.

After completing in the installation, I was pleased to find that power management worked perfectly - closing the laptop puts it to sleep, and it resumes when opened, just like in OS X. It also dims the screen when idle, and there are alternate settings for running on battery power. Since Apple considers two trackpad buttons aesthetically offensive, the right mouse button is emulated using F11. There's no trackpad scrolling for this model iBook, even though it possible to get this working in OS X with the iScroll2 driver, so that's a little disappointing. The battery indicator works fine, and battery life appears even better than in OS X: around 4 hours with an older battery. If the CPU is maxed out for a while, the fans will start going within a few minutes, even before the laptop feels hot. Under OS X, it gets quite hot before the fans start. Better safe than sorry I guess - I know it's possible to tweak the fan settings in some config file, but it seems fine to me.

There were a couple problems after the installation finished. Number one, I had trouble with yum. I was able to update software using the "Software Updater" GUI frontend in Gnome, but running yum update and yum upgrade reported that there was nothing to update. Also, yum search and install failed even on packages that should be in the repos. I ended up adding fedora-extra, livna and dribble repos for extra packages and giving up. In addition, whenever yum runs it maxes on the CPU for a few minutes before installing. I'm used to using apt and pacman, so I'm not sure if this is normal or not - you would think Yellow Dog would get it right since yum was originally their creation (yum stands for Yellowdog Updater Modified).

The second problem was the wireless, which illustrated the problem with the missing Apple community in YDL since the switch to Intel. After searching for a couple of hours, I finally figured out that the driver is included and working in the kernel, but the firmware is not. I installed bcm-fwcutter with yum, which extracts the firmware from Broadcom's proprietary drivers - you can point it your OS X partition if you have one. I ended downloading the driver off some random site I've forgotten. After running bcm-fwcutter drivername, copying the extracted files to /lib/firmware, and rebooting, the wireless worked fine. I was amazed that YDL's documentation didn't include any notes about this, and also that I couldn't find anything on their forums about it.

In addition to my problems with yum, my only complaint is that some of the packages they include are a bit old - Gnome dates back to 9/07 with version 2.16 and Gimp is 2.22 - the current version is 2.51.

All in all, I'm quite happy with YDL - I hate dealing with tuning Linux performance for a laptop, and they have that covered. Now that Apple's decided to stop supporting the PPC architecture with their next version of OS X (Snow Leopard), I hope YDL will keep working to give old Apple hardware new life.

The purpose of this blog

After using Linux for a couple years, and inevitably running in to many problems, I've created this blog as a place to dump notes on how to fix problems I've encountered. Although I've tinkered with web design, including some web apps, I'm too lazy to bother creating anything fancy, so I figured a blogspot account would work just fine. Maybe I'll post a few thoughts as well.

The Rockhoppper is one of the penguin species that hasn't been claimed as a distro name yet as far as I know. Of course, there are other Linux projects named after it - there's only 17 penguin species after all, and a gazillion Linux developers . . .