On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 03:24:33PM -0400, Beartooth wrote: > My wife has an Apple G3 iBook, which currently has Yellow Dog 3.0 and OSX, > and which I play troubleshooter for. We both detest the Apple interface, There's a new release of Yellow Dog coming soon. Supposedly it's coming at the end of the month and it's going to be based on Fedora Core. I've heard some people refer to the upcoming release as Yellow Dog 4. For example: http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yellowdog-general/2004-May/013744.html > and have only ever used it for a dialup connection at her mother's. (The > ISP there supports Apple but not linux, and I last time I tried, I > couldn't manage to hack a linux connection even when I had the OSX one up > and running.) At least some of the PowerBook modems require closed-source drivers from Linuxant. Last time I tried to get a PowerBook G4 modem running under Linux (September or October of last year), I gave up and told the user to simply stick with OS X. The driver has been updated since then, so maybe it actually works now... > I tried, most of a year ago, to upgrade the iBook with yum to 3.0.1, and > got caught behind a learning curve steeper than I had time, moving into a > then new house, to traverse. I've thought of getting 3.0.1, or whatever > may be out by now, on CDs, and just doing a fresh install. But maybe I > don't need to. A new release of YDL (some people are calling it YDL 4, but I don't know for sure that it will actually be called that) is supposed to be coming out at the end of this month. It's going to be based on Fedora Core (probably FC2, I would guess). I think this upcoming Yellow Dog release would be better for you than Fedora Core. > Surely someone here has experience, or knows where to look: if I install > Fedora instead (FC1 -- I'm far too sub-technoid to tackle FC2 till FC3 > comes out) is it a straightforward install? Do I have to get special CDs? The CD's/DVD's for installing Fedora Core on standard PC's will not work for Macs. On Macs, FC1 has to be "upgraded" from YDL 3.0.x (basically the way that you can upgrade from YDL 3.0 to 3.0.1 using yum, except going to FC1 is much much more difficult). FC1 on the Mac has no kernel (you use the one left over from YDL) and no installer. In fact, it's missing a whole bunch of other stuff on Macs too, and the end result is really more of a weird hybrid of FC1 and YDL. Overall, the process is definitely not a "straightforward install". FC2 works much more smoothly, in my experience. (Right now I'm typing on a PowerBook G3 running FC2, in fact.) Pedro Fernandes Macedo already responded to you and linked to a web page with instructions for installing FC2. It's not quite as straightforward as YDL yet, but it's getting there. > Does it matter whether I try to preserve either current OS? I'd actually > prefer to wipe OSX, and take my chances with the ISP in the Great Smokies > again. Since you already have the system running as OS X/Linux dual-boot, it's going to be easier to keep it that way than to make it Linux/Linux dual-boot. I've never tried doing that on a NewWorld Mac (yours is a NewWorld), so I don't know exactly what's involved, but I imagine it could be very tricky. Besides, you already one set of Linux partitions; if you reuse those, that will be much easier than repartitioning. If you're not already familiar with Mac partitioning for Linux, which has a different set of quirks than PC partitioning, then save yourself the trouble this time. Also, if I were in your shoes, I would *definitely* keep the OS X partition around for dialup. Even if I managed to get the Linuxant modem driver working, I wouldn't trust it to not suddenly break without warning. > -- > Beartooth Implacable, curmudgeonly codger learning linux If you have the time and energy to dive into somewhat deeper waters, Gentoo Linux is a good way to learn quite a bit, on Macs or PC's. (On PC's, Slackware is also a good distribution to learn with.) -Barry K. Nathan <barryn@xxxxxxxxx>
