Thoughts on YDL 2.0


Subject: Thoughts on YDL 2.0
From: michael (mlibby@qwest.net)
Date: Sat Jun 16 2001 - 08:00:47 MDT


Congratulations and thank you to the TerraSoft team for putting together a
great distribution. Having fallen in love with Debian on my x86 systems (and
wanting to be as zealous as possible on the Free Software angle of Linux), I
tried to run Debian-powerpc on my iMac. Not a fun time at all.

So I figured that YDL 2 was the way to go... and it is. Here are some of the
thoughts I've got about it so far:

* The installer looks nice, but I liked that that old installer had the
option to do a package by package review before install. I don't want
Mozilla, Netscape, pine, pico, mpg123 and a few other things to load. Some
for performance reasons, some for license reasons, some because I will never
use them. Did I miss something in how to get the new installer to do this?

* Question: is there something about kernel 2.4.4 that is undesirable that it
isn't loaded straight away? How about putting an option for kernel flavor in
the install? I didn't have any trouble (that I know of at this time)
installing it from the RPMs on Tasty Morsels, but I was left wondering why I
needed to do this.

* I like KDE as the default desktop when you first install, login as a user,
and "startx". The K menu is a bit hairy, but that's the nature of the beast I
guess. I didn't see Kaim installed by default, although gaim is in there.
Suggestion to add that to the default packages or get it on the menu, if I
didn't simply overlook it.

* Ogg Vorbis with XMMS didn't seem to work until I manually installed libogg
and libvorbis dev packages, then recompiled XMMS from the source (having
removed mpg123 and trying to get away from mp3 in general for license and
patent reasons). Rebuilding XMMS was problem-free, so I humbly suggest
including Ogg Vorbis support out of the box.

* Never got MOL to work under CS 1.2, but it works great now. Hopefully I can
get rid of the quickly aging Mac OS 8.6 partition once I figure out all my
peripherals under Linux, but until then it's really handy to be able to look
at the Mac from inside Linux and at least run some of those applications
without having to reboot.

And really, that's it. I'm aware that the things I mention are pretty picky.
so just let me reiterate that YDL 2 is excellent and I'm looking forward to
another enjoyable year with that iMac. Thanks again TSS!



This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Sat Jun 16 2001 - 07:04:59 MDT