Let me preface this by saying that I am personally interested in the future of PPC CBE; I will be buying a PS3 just to experiment with the YDL-supported development stuff. And my company will almost certainly enter into a strategic partnership with some CBE partner, possibly TerraSoft.
That said, I have to give up on the YDL 5 for Apple. The PPC machine I run Linux on is a trusty Pismo. It isn't my main machine, but the one I feel most comfortable with when creative. I had YDL 4 on it and was quite happy except for the fact that TerraSoft sort of abandoned ship on the RPMs. YDL 4 had no sound support on that machine, but it didn't matter to me at all. Everything else just worked. What I expected with v5 was much the same experience, plus perhaps a few extra refinements. I also expected KDE to be available as an option, though I was willing to give E17 a try. And if all went well, I was prepared to buy a YDL.net account to have access to the expected RPMs for both the Pismo personally and the company PS3. But I will be erasing v5 from my disk, going back to v4 and getting someone here to build the PPC RPMs I need. Why? - v5 doesn't support sleep. If you close the Pismo, the machine locks in a way that while it doesn't ever wake, it uses battery. v4 just worked. This alone makes v5 unusable for me. - the installer is a mess. You have no options whatever. You simply install what TerraSoft thinks you should have and use the add/remove facility afterward to adjust. The only problem is that "remove" of even the most trivial thing is likely to remove something else important, forcing you to, well, start the entire process over. - the Emacs (which you have to add) has almost none of the packages from that ecosphere. - KDE is an option. But don't be fooled. Its not the full KDE, what KDE considers its core suite. This is Koffice (word processor, spreadsheet, presenter, database, and slew of other stuff) and Kontact (mail, calendar, contacts, notes, news, sync). It looks like most but not all of Kontact is included, but NONE of Koffice. I should note here that if you use KDE at all, the reason probably is because the apps integrate so wonderfully with each other, Konqueror (the unique file manager/web browser combination) and the development suite. Also, if you are a Mac user, KDE allows you to place the menubar at the top where it belongs and also to rearrange the window widgets to be where Mac users expect them to be. So having KDE without the core apps plus Konquerer, well, it just ain't KDE. Not even close. YDL 5 has neither Konqueror nor any piece of Koffice. Someone might miss the point here and respond that I just use the Microsoft Office clone, OpenOffice. No thanks. Not only does Kword integrate better, it is the ONLY framebased text editor in the open source world. Its a big difference, just by itself. But look how each frame can be a component from another KDE app. I would even have used it under E17, but that's not possible. No Scribus either, so no high end page layout. So here's what I propose to do personally. I'll probably do the whole bit with TerraSoft on the CBE. But for my loved Pismo, I'll go back to v4 and pay someone to teach me Konstruct, or go with custom building every week or so. -Ted -- __________ Ted Goranson Sirius-Beta _______________________________________________ yellowdog-newbie mailing list [email protected] http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-newbie
