Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) is a discontinued

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operating system for high-performance computing on multi-core processor computer architectures, focusing on GPU systems and computers using the POWER7 processor. The original developer was Terra Soft Solutions, which was acquired by Fixstars in October 2008. Yellow Dog Linux was first released in the spring of 1999 for Apple Macintosh PowerPC-based computers. The most recent version, Yellow Dog Linux 7, was released on August 6, 2012. Yellow Dog Linux lent its name to the popular YUM Linux software updater, derived from YDL's YUP (Yellowdog UPdater) and thus called Yellowdog Updater, Modified.

Features

Yellow Dog Linux is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux/

CentOS CentOS (, from Community Enterprise Operating System; also known as CentOS Linux) is a Linux distribution that provides a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat En ...

and relies on the

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. Its software includes applications such as Ekiga (a voice-over-IP and videoconferencing application),

GIMP GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized task ...

(a raster graphics editor), Gnash (a free Adobe Flash player), gThumb (an image viewer), the

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Web browser, the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail and news client, the OpenOffice.org productivity suite,

Pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

(an instant messaging and IRC client), the Rhythmbox music player, and the KDE Noatun and Totem media players. Starting with YDL version 5.0 'Phoenix',

Enlightenment Enlightenment or enlighten may refer to: Age of Enlightenment * Age of Enlightenment, period in Western intellectual history from the late 17th to late 18th century, centered in France but also encompassing (alphabetically by country or culture): ...

is the Yellow Dog Linux default desktop environment, although

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and KDE are also included. Like other Linux distributions, Yellow Dog Linux supports software development with GCC (compiled with support for C, C++, Java, and Fortran), the GNU C Library, GDB, GLib, the

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprie ...

toolkit, Python, the Qt toolkit, Ruby and Tcl. Standard text editors such as

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and

Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

are complemented with IDEs such as

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and KDevelop, as well as by graphical debuggers such as KDbg. Standard document preparation tools such as TeX and LaTeX are also included. Yellow Dog Linux includes software for running a Web server (such as Apache/httpd, Perl, and PHP), database server (such as MySQL and

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

), and network server ( NFS and Webmin). Additional software is also included for running an enterprise server or a compute server or cluster, although two separate products from Terra Soft Solutions, called Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux (for enterprise servers) and Y-HPC (for compute servers/clusters), were specifically targeted toward those applications. Although several other Linux distributions support the Power ISA, Yellow Dog Linux was distinguished for its focus on supporting the Apple Macintosh platform before the Mac transition to Intel processors. Before this transition, Terra Soft Solutions held the unique distinction of being the only company licensed by Apple to resell Apple computers with Linux pre-installed (or for that matter, with any operating system other than Mac OS X). Full support for AirPort (Apple's implementation of the

IEEE 802.11b-1999 IEEE 802.11b-1999 or 802.11b is an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 wireless networking specification that extends throughput up to 11 Mbit/s using the same 2.4 GHz band. A related amendment was incorporated into the IEEE 802.11-2007 standard. ...

wireless networking standard), and partial support for AirPort Extreme, are also built into Yellow Dog Linux, as are support for Bluetooth and support for accessing the Internet over cellular phones. Following the Mac transition to Intel processors, Yellow Dog Linux retargeted Fedora Core 5.0 and later to support the Sony PlayStation 3 and IBM pSeries platforms extensively, while retaining its longstanding support for PowerPC-based Apple hardware.

Distribution

Yellow Dog Linux was sold by Terra Soft Solutions (later Fixstars), who also marketed PlayStation 3 consoles, IBM workstations, and servers with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed. As is the case with most other Linux distribution vendors, a portion of the revenue from the sale of those boxed distributions went toward development of the operating system and applications, which are made available as source code under various free and open-source licenses.

Notable implementations

Gaurav Khanna Gaurav Khanna (born 11 December 1981) is an Indian television actor and model. He is known for his roles of Neil in ''Jeevan Saathi'', Inspector Kavin in ''CID'' and Akshay in '' Tere Bin''. He currently portrays Anuj Kapadia in Star Plus's '' ...

, a professor in the Physics Department at the

University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (UMass Dartmouth or UMassD) is a public research university in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. It is the southernmost campus of the University of Massachusetts system. Formerly Southeastern Massachusetts Un ...

, built a message-passing based cluster using YDL and 16 PlayStation 3s. This cluster was the first such to generate published scientific results. Dubbed the "PS3 Gravity Grid", it performs astrophysical simulations of large supermassive black holes capturing smaller compact objects. Khanna claims that the cluster's performance exceeds that of a 100+ Intel Xeon core based traditional Linux cluster on his simulations. The PS3 Gravity Grid gathered significant media attention between 2007 and 2010.

Release history

References

External links

Yellow Dog Linux on PS3

Yellow Dog Linux home page
*
penguinppc.org
– Linux on PowerPC site
Yellow Dog Linux archive

Reviews

"Software Review: Yellow Dog Linux 5 for PlayStation 3"
– BlogCritics Magazine review of YDL version 5.0

– IGN.com review of YDL version 5.0

– ppcnerds.org review of YDL version 4.0 {{Linux distributions Cell BE architecture Discontinued Linux distributions Platform-specific Linux distributions PlayStation 3 software PowerPC operating systems Linux distributions