On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 01:57:22AM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
Package: installation-reports
I retrieved the floppy images at
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc-
small/floppy/
so I could try out a floppy-boot install from them.
I got never even got off the ground...
1) The "boot.img' floppy seems to have nothing on it but the
'vmlinuz' kernel. There's no system folder or any of the other
boilerplate necessary for a bootable floppy. I understand that
there are technical licensing problems with miboot. Nevertheless,
Can you check in the logs to see what happened ? Mmm, indeed :
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-
i/images/daily/build_powerpc-small_floppy_boot.log
shows :
# We'd like to use miboot, but it isn't in the archive yet ...
#miboot -c ./tmp/powerpc-small_floppy_boot/miboot.conf
# ... so instead we do some grungy HFS hacking.
I wonder who did that modification, and i probably pulled it in when
upgrading :/
there at least ought to be a README file somewhere that gives the
adventurous user, willing to ignore the licensing problems, the
necessary magic incantations to transform this neutered thing into
a live/virile/bootable floppy by mixing it with miboot (however
obtained) under the light of a full moon at midnight.
What i would really like is to have miboot go at least to contrib
if not main.
The step to do this is for someone else than me though, or i would
not be able
to do the reimplementation. The idea is to look at the miboot boot
block
format, and extract the first header part (which is ok to reuse)
and the
little bit of code afterward, which are rumored to be trap calls
to the mac
rom, in m68k assembly. And describe what it is doing, so a clean-room
reimplementation can be done from it.
2) The 'root.img' file is bigger than will fit onto a 1.44 MB
floppy. Worse, for all it's size, it seems to contain nothing but
a 'lost+found' directory -- no install scripts or anything else!
Is there a different place I should be getting the floppy images from?
Nope, someone broke them, and svn seems broken right now :/
BTW, can you look at the kernel found here :
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-
i/images/daily/powerpc/netboot/vmlinuz-coff.initrd
and try to boot it from the serial console OF and write an
installation report ?
Friendly,
Sven Luther