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



On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 02:32:49PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
> > Well, we had it in woody boot-floppies, it seems.
> 
> I will be charatable and assume that was an accident, similar to many of
> the dozens of other non-free peices of software we have shipped in
> woody, and removed from sarge.

A reasonable compromise maybe ? 

> > Also, maybe we should remove d-i from main altogether, since it depends
> > on non-free code in the bios of your motherboard ? 
> 
> I don't participate in reducio ad absurdum discussions like this one,
> sorry.

Ok, i will retire this, but it doesn't remain less true because you
choose to ignore it.

If i came up with the following : 

  1) A description in text form of what the individual bits of this 1K
  boot sector does, and what is needed for miboot booting.
  2) a small C program or shell script which generate said 1K boot
  sector from some kind of more formal version of the above description.

Would it then be considered as free and could go in main ?

This doesn't solve the other problem, and namely the fact that miboot
and other boot loaders are not buildable from main without a
considerable cross compiler development effort, which may not be worth
it.

Friendly,

Sven Luther



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