Re: OldWorld Mac-specific problems; perhaps drop?
On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 05:12:09AM -0400, Daniel Dickinson wrote:
> As you know I've been doing a fair bit of playing around with d-i and debian on oldworld powerpc macintosh, although I'm only just now getting a development machine setup. Because of the problems with a lack of dfsg-free means to boot the installer on old world, the fact that the only method available for sarge no longer works (BootX; which can't be used on new world machiens) with 2.6.16 kernels, and that the 2.6.16+ kernels fail to boot on old world macs, the fact that old world macs are pretty darn old, and the fact that they're not nearly as common as p1's, for which one hears occaisional murmurs about creating a light desktop for, but little action), I am wondering if it makes sense to drop old world mac support altogether. If not, I'm happy to continue working on it (I've just about got a development environment set up on a StarMax; the slowness has been due to the vc I'm using to track /etc, /boot etc requiring more cpu than expected).
The official method of booting oldworld powermacs is using the miboot
floppies, and altough miboot is currently non-free, work is under way to free
it, and there are other people here who are working on bettering the floppies,
please participate to that effort or something.
BootX was not a recomended way to boot those machines as far as i am
concerned.
There are rumors that you can use also a .coff kernel+ramdisk and use that one
to boot those boxes, which would be gully free, but nobody ever investigated
this.
So what would you gain by dropping support ?
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Reply to: