Re: Bootable Debian install CD-ROM for Mac 68k
On Sat, Oct 21, 2006 at 01:24:30AM +0200, Laurent Vivier wrote:
> I'm happy to announce EMILE, my bootloader for Macintosh m68k, is now
> able to create bootable CD-ROM.
>
> I've juste created an install CD-ROM for sarge.
This is definitely a good thing. Thank you for putting in this effort,
as I'm sure a fair number of us will appreciate it in the future. In
fact, the ppc people might even appreciate it if it helps getting CD-ROM
boot to work on oldworld or nubus powermacs.
> But as it contains Apple copyrighted materials (the AppleDriver), it
> cannot be distributed widely.
> It's only a first step, I'm working on writing a "dummy" AppleDriver
> of my own (a real AppleDriver is not needed for Linux... I guess)
> For the moment, EMILE must extract an AppleDriver from a MacOS
> bootable CDROM.
My understanding is that while Linux itself doesn't need the AppleDriver,
the ROM will ignore a drive that doesn't have something that at least
looks like a valid driver. It will automatically try to load the driver
from each drive and try to use it, and I'm pretty sure that any failures
remove that disk from the boot order. However, Apple does have a fair
amount of documentation on how to write the driver. It's just extra work
that noone has had time to finish. I read the docs at one point and came
to the conclusion that other work had a higher priority. Apple always
supported 3rd-party drivers, since they deliberately didn't license
their own for use on drives from other companies.
Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com
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