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Re: new installer



On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 10:49:16AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 12:33:53AM -0800, Ethan Benson wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 10:19:58AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > > > a .coff kernel won't autoboot, the user would have to manually get
> > > > into OpenFirmware and boot it explicity.
> > > 
> > > Ok, the .coff is for manual installation using the OF. 
> > 
> > yes which is unprecedented for oldworlds.
> 
> Huh ???

nobody boots the installer via OF on oldworlds, never have.

OF isn't used for booting until the base system is installed on the
disk and quik installed.

> > currently oldworlds boot via a non-OF based bootloader called miboot,
> 
> Ah, ok.
> 

> I am currently doing kernel work, but i plan to look at
> yaboot2/prom-libc after that, as i told you, altough i told you i would
> have time in september, which is obviously missing. But it will in any
> case be too late for the sarge release, so ...

we shall see.

> > BootX is a macos program and is thus irrelevant to debian.
> 
> Not so, it could be used to boot the initial installation disk, could it
> not ? You create a bootx directory or image or whatever, and then start
> that, which will follow up to install debian and quik or whatever.

debian mandates no reliance on non-free software, macos is very
non-free.  and in fact most oldworld people i encounter on irc do NOT
have any macos available when starting the install process.  thus
depending on bootx would be very foolish.

> Does BootX also work on newworld ?

absolutly not.

> > all irrelevant.  look at vmlinux a the root of the source tree.
> 
> All irrelevant to you maybe, but i need to build kernels for all
> architecture from a single kernel build on a single subarch (this being
> a CHRP based pegasos), so i need to look into this, or i will simply
> ship the chrp kernel, which will not work for other ppc subarches.

give up on the idea of a master kernel that works on more then one
powerpc, its not gunna happen.

as for arch/ppc none of that works with any powerpc bootloader.
yaboot2 might accept some of them, MIGHT.  but for now, ONLY the
vmlinux at the root of the tree if of any use.

> > yaboot (and quik, and miboot) requires the vmlinux at the root of the
> > source tree.  all that crap in arch/ppc is irrlevant and unusable for
> > bootloaders.
> 
> But for miboot it can be compressed ? What about quick ?

miboot is the only loader that supports gzip.  yaboot2 will support
gzip too.

> > > This leaves the miboot.image and the vmlinux.gz i don't know anything
> > > about.
> > 
> > both wrong.
> 
> What are these for then ?

who knows, they are probably cruft.

> > retarded mess that is yaboot-installer.  whoever got ahold of that has
> > obviously NEVER read one line of yaboot documentation, nor ever looked
> > at the yaboot package.
> 
> Hey come on, insulting people is not a good way of going forward, and in
> general gives other a bad opinion of you. And it seems that work about

im not insulting anyone, im stating FACTS.

facts such as:

1) ybin is in /usr/sbin, not /sbin (and won't be until 2.0)
2) for first yaboot install you *MUST* run mkofboot NOT ybin.
3) the bootstrap partition does NOT need HFS for mkofboot to work.

all of this is VERY well documented.  and the first version of
yaboot-installer created by Colin Walters did not have any of these
problems, someone took it over after Colin abandoned the powerpc
platform and proceeded to break it in numerous ways.

in any event i already provide all the tool debian needs, they should
just run yabootconfig and things will just work.  thats how woody is done.

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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