Yellow Dog Linux 6.2 released

The Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) developers have announced the release of version 6.2 of their PowerPC distribution that runs on the Sony PlayStation 3 and other computers with Cell processors, including IBM's Cell blades. The new release upgrades the 64-bit Linux to 2.6.29 and includes components like IBM's Cell SDK version 3.1.0.1, as well as OpenOffice 3.0 and Firefox 3.06. The developers use version 2.6.27 of the Linux kernel for 32-bit PPC processors and have fine-tuned the distribution's Wi-Fi support via the graphical Wicd tool.

Version 6.2 of YDL now includes libfreevec, a library with replacement routines for GLIBC released under the LGPL, which has been used to optimise the AltiVec vector engine found in G4/G4+ PowerPC CPUs to improve performance by up to 25 per cent. A fourth alternative desktop environment has been added to YDL 6.2: Xfce 4 is now included, along with the default Enlightenment (E17) desktop and optional KDE and GNOME desktops.

Terra Soft Solutions, the company behind Yellow Dog, was bought by Japanese owned Cell processor specialist Fixstars Solutions at the end of last year. The Fixstars distribution is based on the free CentOS Red Hat clone. Yellow Dog Linux 6.2 is available from the YDL.net subscription service and costs $70. In late July, the distribution should be freely available to download from their public mirror servers.

(crve)