I got a discarded PowerMac 7200/120 from a friend, with the intention of making an MP3 jukebox out of it. Theoretically such a thing would be possible using MacOS, with a native web server, some kind of scripting language (AppleScript? Frontier?) or compiled MacOS CGI (can you imagine?), and a native mp3 player.

However, I'd rather just write it in PHP.

Who knows? Maybe someone's ported Apache and PHP to MacOS by now? If so, I pity them.

But I digress. I'd been wanting to try this for a long time. I went to the site (www.yellowdoglinux.com), downloaded the ISO, burned the CD, and then started following the instructions, which consisted of putting an Extension, a Control Panel, and two other files into your System Folder, rebooting, and running through a Redhat-derived installation menu system.

Some observations:

I didn't have a second SCSI hard disk laying around, so I had to repartition my drive first. Since there is apparently no equivalent of FIPS or PartitionMagic, that involved wiping the existing MacOS partition by booting with the MacOS CD, and using Drive Setup (which is really damn easy), then reinstalling MacOS on the (newer, smaller) partition I'd selected for it, having left a large unpartitioned space for later. No biggie. However, once I got into the install menus, I found the Macified fdisk (pdisk, actually) to take just a little adjustment from the x86 version we all know so well... syntax, commands, and style are slightly different and not as polished.

Also, when they say in the manual that you must reboot for your partition changes to take effect, otherwise the installation will experience "unusual problems" - they mean it. I'm used to ignoring that warning on Intel boxes. However, ignoring it on the PowerMac didn't fly. I ended up with a corrupt filesystem and had to start over.

Sound failed to work by default. Yellow Dog's (small) FAQ had the problem (an alias line needed in conf.modules) listed and an effortless fix; why they didn't just fix their installer so you don't have to worry about it is an open question.

Following that, it worked perfectly. This PowerMac subjectively appears to compare favorably overall to middle-end Pentium II computers, which is impressive, since this model was introduced in early '96. The relative snappiness of the X server was an especially pleasant surprise. Interestingly, Yellow Dog's install-time X Windows configuration actually works, unlike Redhat's.

A quick security review indicates that the Yellow Dog maintainers corrected most of the glaring "turn everything on" problems with the Redhat base. Nice change of pace. They also supported almost all of the "cool" features - Gnome and KDE goodies, Gimp, Freeciv, Netscape, etc. etc. There is an included autoupdate tool (yup), so you can effortlessly keep up with patches. After several hours of tinkering around, everything seems to be solidly configured and in the right place; more than I can often say for a comparable Redhat install.

The free Mac On Linux system is included, allowing you to run MacOS pseudo-emulated (ala VMWare) in a window. This is the icing on the cake, positioning YDL as an early alternative to MacOS X - you can work in Linux and MacOS simultaneously, allowing for backwards compatibility while keeping you crash-proof. Playing around with it, I found it to be a bit clunky and unreliable, with ROM fiddling and config file editing still required, and sound and networking non-functional. Time will no doubt improve the system. It also appears heavily geared towards newer (iMac grade) hardware; I'd guess users of these machines will have less trouble than I did.

I've been impressed by the ubiquity of PPC-built RPMs, as well as the comparatively good state of gcc and the libs. I haven't done a major survey, but my experience so far has been that aside from device-bound programs, everything will compile without complaint.

Overall, I'd say this is a fine distribution, just a little rough around the edges, built on top of an excellent compiler, libraries, and kernel, with stability and performance comparable if not superior to x86 Linux. This is better than I expected, and I already have automatic high expectations when using Linux.