14 DAY TRIAL // Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) version 6.0 was released yesterday by its producing company, Terra Soft. This edition is available on the following platforms: Sony PS3, Apple G4/G5 and IBM System P. YDL is built upon CentOS, a derivative from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and brings good quality to the home user.
Kai Staats, Terra Soft CEO, stated: "This particular release marks an important point in our history, leading into our tenth year of Linux OS development and distribution for the Power architecture. To put things in perspective, in the spring of 1999 all installers were text-based, cell phone modems functioned only in the movies, and the fastest desktops ran at 300MHz ... it would be another year before we shipped with AltiVec support. Now, the Cell CPU offers 3.2GHz across 9 cores and our cell phones nearly equal the performance of a desktop of 1999."
The new version includes some components borrowed from Fedora 7, and integrates the E17 desktop to provide a good and clean interface.
The main features are:
￭ E17 and Gnome desktop managers are installed by default, but you can opt for KDE too. ￭ Gnash, the Flash work-alike. ￭ Ekiga VoIP, Pidgin IM/IRC, and Fluendo codec installer. ￭ kernel v2.6.23, gcc v4.1.1, gblic v2.5, and Eclipse v3.2.2 ￭ Yellow Dog Linux includes Cell SDK v3.0. ￭ IBM iRT (interactive raytrace) demo available via YDL.net Enhanced.
What does Yellow Dog Linux support:
￭ Sony PS3. ￭ Apple PowerPC G4, G5. ￭ IBM System p (JS2x, 510, 520, 540). ￭ 802.11b Airport auto-configuration ￭ Audio on all tested machines. ￭ Sony PS3 Sixaxis game controller. ￭ Cell phone Internet connections with configuration.
After you install YDL, you will have Firefox as default web browser, Thunderbird email client, Pidgin instant messenger and IRC client, Ekiga for VoIP, gThumb and GIMP for your photo viewing/editing needs, OpenOffice, Rythmbox and much more multimedia apps, games and many personal accessories. In the custom installation menus, you will find development and server tools, if you need them.