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I had various GUI problems with YDL as well. Nothing I did would allow resolutions higher than 1024x768. I could chose, test, and verify higher resolutions during installation but they did not work when I booted the system. In fact, I could not always switch to a virtual terminal and shut down gracefully as X11 someties crashed hard enough to cause either a kernel panic or a total lockup.

I have OpenBSD installed on my G4 and I really like it. I don't think it offers all the bells and whistles that FreeBSD does on x86 hardware* but it serves my needs well. I wanted a good CLI UNIX environment with lots of tools and OpenBSD delivers.

It took me a couple of days and a many attempts to get it installed. As you say, following the directions is important. I missed the small, but critical, step of actually writing my changes out with pdisk before I carried on with the installation. About 20 times. Oops. Once I figured out what I was doing wrong installation was a cakewalk.



As an aside, how is FreeBSD to install and use? Is there a lot of precompiled software available for it or do you have to install a lot from source? How well does the Linux compatibilty stuff I have read about work? How similar (or different) is FreeBSD from Darwin? I ask this last question because I have found FreeBSD related websites extremely useful when looking for info about tweaking Darwin/OS X.




* I haven't used FreeBSD so this is an impression gained from reading a bunch of stuff about both OSes. It may very well be that OpenBSD on PPC offers everything that FreeBSD on x86 does. But I don't think so. The OpenBSD docs indicate that some features available on the x86 version don't work on PPC. Virtual terminals and Linux compatibility are two examples. There may be more.

Cool. It sounds like FreeBSD is much like OpenBSD as far as installation and use are concerned. I don't mind installing stuff from source. I have done so with several things on Linux, Darwin, and OS X. As you say, this allows the installation to be tailored to a particular system, and sometimes source is the only option. I find this most often with Darwin/OS X. Curiously enough, I have found pre-compiled packages for all the stuff I want or need for PowerPC OpenBSD, so far.

A couple of things you should know about OpenBSD:

1) It is free, but you cannot download ISOs. They really want you to pay for CDs. I didn't mind because OpenBSD is based in Western Canada so I feel good helping them out. You can download all the files that are included on the install disc but it is up to you to make a bootable install CD.

2) I have had no luck getting X11 to work at anything other than 1024x768 and 8 bit colour. Manually editing the X11 config files doesn't seem to help nor does the CLI config utility. I have not experimented too much with this part of the system because it is not a priority for me. I am more interested in a secure, functional CLI environment where I don't have a lot of GUI stuff to fall back on. I wanted a learning experience and I learn best with the "sink or swim" approach.