Today I had a lot of fun setting up Yellow Dog Linux on a Blue and White G3. Beyond some initial formatting issues, the install went very smoothly. Yellowdog is essentially Redhat 8 cleaned up for PPC. I was pretty surprised at how well KDE ran on a 450mhz processor. The rage 128 in that machine does not support hardware acceleration, but dragging windows around is not horrible by any means. I was expecting it to be a dog (pardon the pun).
apt-get is pretty much broken, and yellowdog wants you to use yum. But there is a problem. The version of python that ships with YD 3.0.1 cannot properly deal with URL syntax that includes colons. So when I set an environmental proxy variable that includes a name and password, it thinks the colon is denoting the port number and chokes. Fun. Apt-get deals with this right, so it’s a bummer that I can’t use it. So before leaving work I set up a wget to snag the directory from the FTP site and will just do it locally tomorrow.