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



On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 10:30:23PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
> 
> >  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.
> 
> If you can document the functionality of the code (and "this instruction
> followed by this instruction followed by this instruction" isn't good
> enough - describe what's happening) and if someone else then writes an
> implementation based on that and releases it under a free license, we
> can ship it.

And what about a : call mac os rom function 'blah', followed by call to
mac os rom function 'foo' and so on ? And it happens that there is only
one recomended way of making those macos rom functions (A-traps i hear) ?

> >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.
> 
> 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

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.

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.

Friendly,

Sven Luther



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