A fresher Linux for Macs

A fresh version of the leading Linux for Macintosh computers, Yellow Dog, is now available for download from TerraSoft Solutions.

Although Mandrake and SuSE both offer distros for PowerPC, TerraSoft is the only vendor to focus solely on Mac.

(We're trying really hard not to say that they're a "pure play" here, as it's one of those linguistic atrocities - like "upside" and "disintermediation" - that should have been entombed in concrete when the bubble economy collapsed.)

Yellow Dog Linux 2.2 includes updated support for ATI and NVidia graphics cards and the proprietary ADC video interface, and it comes with KDE 2.2.2 and Gnome 1.4 plus Nautilus, and TerraSoft has also added an "HPC Node" option to the range of installation profiles. The company sells G3 and G4 based hardware for technical computing clusters, including the briQ, um, … Brick thing.

As YDL users probably already know, if you have OS X installed, the X boot manager automatically recognizes the Linux partition.

We've been playing with YDL since the MacWorldExpo, and we really should have posted a mini review by now, but time constraints prevented us from investigating the touchpad and sound glitches we encountered on our iBook. Even so, it's impressed us with its performance and ease of installation, and compared to OS X it's plenty snappy.,

You can find out more here. And it doesn't have The Dock. ®

Bootnote: Thanks to generous contributions from Register readers, our "Kill The Dock" slush fund now stands at $105.

That's the bounty Apple employees will receive for deleting the source code to this UI atrocity from the OS X source tree. To whom we say: not only will you gain immortality for deleting this bendy, patronising, alpha-blended piece of crap from our Macs, but a hundred bucks can go a long way in the Valley, these days. See
Apple exec refused 'Kill Dock' bribe for more the history of this community project. ®