Re: Debian-installer, older hardware, boot loaders, miboot & amiboot & ..

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:

> On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 10:30:23PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > Sven Luther wrote:
> > Yes, that's somewhat more of an issue. I'd expect amiboot to be
> > buildable without excessive effort, although the Amiga includes aren't
> > Free. We can't really ship amiboot as part of d-i anyway - it's a
> > loadlin equivilent, not a syslinux one. Amiga-lilo used to exist and

Amiga-lilo had afaik no support for graphics crads and probably no 060
support.

> The main difference being that all the stuff needed are part of the
> amiga rom, while this is not the case for msdos, if i remember well.

The rom and system header files are part of the hardware/operating
system. Iirc the 'syscall' numbers and parameter format is shiped with
the Amiga Basic. If pulling a few function offsets needed for amiboot
(a few '#define open_library -236') out of a hat isn't legally good
enough, they could be extracted from there. That should cover the legal
side even if the C header are not falling under the "distributed with
the OS" part. They can also be taken out of the many programming books
or for Amigas.

> I think that the easiest way would be to have a amiga bootable
> partition, with amiboot and the auto-executing amiga shell script needed
> to launch it. This may all be installable from linux, provided either i
> finish the affs create implementation in libparted, or we package Roman
> Zippel's mkaffs. This would be a rather clean way of doing this, and you
> can even rely on the early amiga-rom based boot selector, and play with
> boot priorities to have it auto loaded or go to amiga os.

You need a RGDB, which parted can create, a OFS formated partition (or
the l:filesystem) for old roms (newer roms have affs), the shell
script, the amiboot, the 68040.library or the 68060.library +
68040dummy.library, the setpatch and the device driver for various
graphics cards.

Forget about booting linux without going through the already installed
AmigaOS. The best you can do is clone the existing system into a new
boot partition or provide an Amiga Installer script to aid installing
under nativ AmigaOS (which is actually quite easy to write).

MfG
        Goswin