Yellow Dog Linux

From Free net encyclopedia

Yellow Dog Linux, an open source Linux distribution for the PowerPC processor architecture, was first released in 1999 by Terra Soft Solutions, a Colorado-based software company. Competing with other popular Linux distributions, such as Mandriva, Gentoo, and Debian, Yellow Dog Linux soon became the most popular distribution for PowerPC. It defaults to a Bluecurve-themed KDE, although GNOME is also provided and supported.

As of 2006, the current version of Yellow Dog is 4.1. Yellow Dog has tried to provide simple and working hardware support, as well as a system that runs fast on older machines. Due to the closed nature of Apple Computer however, Yellow Dog has been unable to get all hardware features working with current Apple products. Most notably, the Airport Extreme (Apple's 802.11g wireless cards) on Apple Powerbooks, and iBooks will not work in Yellow Dog Linux, without the end-user modifying their kernel and acquiring the cards firmware.

Acclaimed for its ease of use and graphical installer, Yellow Dog Linux is derivative of Fedora Core, and as a result, is equipped with the RPM package manager and other well-known Linux technologies such as GNU, Glibc, GCC, XFree86, KDE, GNOME, and version 2.* of the Linux Kernel.

As well as the usual free downloads, Yellow Dog offers three commercial versions - boxed with manual, support and t-shirt; and whiteboxed with no documentation. These range from $30 to $90, and fund the development of the operating system. Their packaging is designed to match the white polycarbonate coating of the iMac and iBook computers that the desktop version is most likely to be run on.

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Trivia

Yum, the popular RPM-based updater system used by Fedora and other Linux systems, is based on the "Yellow Dog Updater" utility (yup), originally developed for Yellow Dog Linux.

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