Re: OldWorld Mac-specific problems; perhaps drop?
On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 10:20:19PM -0400, Daniel Dickinson wrote:
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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
Because the powerpc manuals for sarge where mostly sub-par, please help
improving the manual so this problem doesn't repeat for sarge.
This issue was discussed enough here, and on debian-powerpc, that everyone
should be aware of it.
> 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).
And did the manual mention that ?
> > 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.
Bah ...
> > 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.
Well, as said, nobody ever tried this, so it may be buggy, i would be happy to
debug this with you (but by middle of august, as i go into offlineland for 3
weeks on saturday).
> > 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.
What exactly is the kernel problem ? And did you file a bug report about it ?
Friendly,
Sven Luther
>
> - --
> 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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