Yellow Dog Linux for Playstation and Apple

Nov 21, 2008

Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) is known for running on Playstation 3 and Apple G4s and G5s. Its manufacturer, Fixstars, has now released version 6.1.

The new YDL version includes some major enhancements. Among them is new support for Firefox 3.0 and, coming soon, OpenOffice 3.0 on Linux. And improvements were made to the graphical wireless configuration tool. Thanks to ps3vram, YDL uses PS3 video RAM for temporary storage or swap. The usual home tools are also included: Thunderbird, Ekiga, Pidgin, Gthumb and Gimp. A surprise: Fluendo serves as multimedia player, presumably because of the integrated MP3 support.

Developers should be happy with Kernel 2.6.27 and IBM's Cell SDK v3.1. X.org 1.4.999 is also on board together with xrandr 1.2.2, which does monitor resolution without an X server restart. Add to that the GCC 4.1.2 compiler and Cell Superscalar from Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Yellow Dog, based on Red Hat's CentOS, recently made headlines by being acquired by Fixstars, whose rationale was that YDL is the only Linux system on the market supporting the Cell Broadband Engine.

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