Re: free miboot - was Re: got quik working with OldWorld G3 Beige 233MHz
On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 01:45:10PM -0400, Rick_Thomas wrote:
> Booting from floppy every time is a pain -- especially since floppies
> tend to go bad (wear out, actually) over time. But it's a possible
> option in the rare case when you haven't got access to any MacOS{89}
> install CD.
>
> But that's a rare situation. The most common situation is that you will
> have a MacOS{8.x,9.x} CD on hand (or can buy one one cheap on e-bay).
As long as you have the official tools, and use them to partition your
drive, you already get the drivers and patches installed. And as long
as you don't accidentally delete them with the partitioning tools in
the installer, it's irrelevant.
> In that case you can use BootX, and don't need (free or otherwise)
> miboot unless you're a free software absolutist. Though, come to think
> of it, even the absolutist will either have to live with quik's quirks
> or allow Apple's non-free drivers to take up space on their system
> disk. (If it helps, you can just think of them as firmware!)
Even in this case, someone would have to write the regular disk drivers.
The patches are just fixes to allow the regular drivers to work at boot
time. Apple is much less likely to let us redistribute those unless we
write it ourselves. They have documented it enough for someone to do
it, since third party drivers were relatively common at one point.
> I guess I'd support the effort of building a clean-room free version of
> miboot, just to keep the absolutists happy (though I'm not of that
> persuasion myself) if I was sure that it *would* keep them happy...
Yes, but that by itself would not be enough to start from nothing and
install. It's messier than it seems like it should be due to the
on-disk driver headache.
To support starting from just a Debian CD on all oldworld boxes as well
as install a bootable system, we need to do the following:
1) Write disk drivers for SCSI and IDE (both HD and CD-ROM)
2) License the patches from Apple (or somehow reverse engineer them)
3) Add support to mac-fdisk to install the drivers and patches
4) Fix miboot to be truly free.
5) Add a miboot installer (similar to ybin/mkofboot)
On the other hand, if you only want to use it on floppies, only #4
(and maybe #5) are needed.
Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com
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