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Trick: Yellow Dog Linux on Power Mac G5 |
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Tuesday, 03 August 2004 |
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The IBM PowerPC® 970 CPUs are well-designed, high-performance chips that ship in millions of end-user systems under Apple Computers' Power Macintosh G5 moniker. These CPUs greatly lower the bar for 64-bit computing on the desktop and on small servers. Currently, Terra Soft's beta Y-HPC is one of only two 64-bit Linuxes that run on G5s. As their names imply, the G5-enabled betas -- both 32- and 64-bit versions -- are for evaluation only. This article is an early look at the promise of Linux™ on a G5 and is intended for developers interested in trying out this combination in anticipation of production-ready releases to come.
This article explores how to set up a dual-boot environment with Yellow Dog Linux/Y-HPC and OSX on G5 systems, including issues to watch for during installation and configuration. Note that the name of the higher performance distribution we are using is Y-HPC; this refers currently to the beta 64-bit product and will later be used for Terra Soft's production-ready 64-bit product. The company's 32-bit product is known as Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) and, for use on G5 machines, is also considered to be in beta. It is currently at version 3.0.1 but will emerge from beta as version 4.0. We first install the 32-bit YDL, then upgrade to a 64-bit Y-HPC kernel. Note that, being beta, neither distribution should be considered ready to run in production development environments. Please also note that, once both versions emerge from beta in several weeks' time, the install procedures should be much simpler than what is outlined here.
Read more at IBM.com |
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