Re: m68k

["Christian T. Steigies" <cts@debian.org>]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 03:09:45PM +0100, Richard Hirst wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 08:21:33AM -0500, Christian T. Steigies wrote:
> > You mean like floppy disks which can boot a mac (and atari and amiga and vme
> > and q40 and sun) into linux? With something like lilo? Nice idea...
> > Has anybody written such a lilo yet? And what about the kernel drivers for
> > floppy access?
> 
> I believe Nick Holgate had boot-floppies working with scsi floppy drives
> for some VME boards.  Most VME board installs are done via the network
> using tftplilo.  The PROM code supports net booting, and tftplilo is an
> executable that processes a lilo.conf-like file on the server, and then
> pulls kernels and ramdisks from the server as required.  Once installed
> we have vmelilo to boot from harddisk.

Well that covers VME, but what about the millions of Mac users, and the
dozens of Amiga and Atari users? And the two or three others?
I never had much luck with floppies on Amiga, most drives are capable of
only 880kb, thats a further limitation in case real floppies work. I played
a little with amiga-lilo, but that keeps crashing on 060 machines, it might
work on non-060 boxes though, but its not available as debian package.

If booting from floppy with a lilo is the only way to go for d-i, I assume
most of m68k has just been kicked out of the bathtub. I was more hoping for
an answer like "Oh no, you completely missunderstood the new d-i, of course
you can still use floppy _images_ and ami|atari-boot and Penguin to boot your
machines"... but then, I don't have enough time to play with that right now
anyway.

Christian