Re: OldWorld Mac-specific problems; perhaps drop?
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On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 12:48:57 +0200
Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> 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
>
> The official method of booting oldworld powermacs is using the miboot
> floppies, and altough miboot is currently non-free, work is under way
I beg to differ. The manual for sarge didn't mention miboot floppies
at all (because they're non-free and apparently can't even be in
non-free). CD booting doesn't work on old world (requires non-free
apple boot code), and netboot only works with built-in ethernet cards
(and not on all systems with them). That leaves BootX, which was also
non-free, but didn't require debian directly use it (unlike the miBoot
floppies).
> to free it, and there are other people here who are working on
> bettering the floppies, please participate to that effort or
> something.
I intend to do what I can, but I don't think we should claim to support
something that we can't, at least not officially.
> BootX was not a recomended way to boot those machines as far as i am
> concerned.
See above
> 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.
How would this work? By setting boot-device and boot-file? I'd try
this, but mkvmlinuz complains about the coff format in the initrd.
> So what would you gain by dropping support ?
We wouldn't be claiming to support something that isn't actually
supported, namely installation on old world mac. Also, if the kernel
situation doesn't get resolved, old world mac won't be supported in
etch.
- --
And that's my crabbing done for the day. Got it out of the way early,
now I have the rest of the afternoon to sniff fragrant tea-roses or
strangle cute bunnies or something. -- Michael Devore
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