Re: your daily build of powerpc floppies
Ralf,
Are you willing/able to install a small MacOS (8 or 9, not X) partition
on these machines? If so, you can use the BootX bootloader. If you
don't know about it, it's a MacOS app that loads a Linux kernel and
ramdisk, along with a boot-time parameter string. BootX provides
essentially all the important functionality of yaboot for NewWorld Macs
or grub/lilo for x86s.
There are four different bootloaders for Macs. One is yaboot, which
only works on NewWorld machines. The others are miboot, quik, and
BootX, which work on OldWorld machines, but not on NewWorld.
For technical reasons having to do with the details of how OldWorld Macs
get driver software for their boot devices, the miboot bootloader will
never be useful for anything but floppy disk booting. Even if the
cleanroom re-implementation project gets off the ground and produces a
working bootloader, this will not change.
Quik gets around this problem by using Open Firmware to access its boot
devices. However, until recently, quik did not support initial
ramdisks. This makes it useless for booting any of the stock 2.6 based
kernels. There is, apparently, in the works an attempt to fix this.
But it's not clear that the fix will make it into the distribution
before sarge is released. Even if a fixed quik makes it possible to
boot 2.6 kernels from a hard disk or over a network, quik's inherent
reliance on specialized model-dependent patches to the Open Firmware
makes me think that it's not (and never will be) for the faint of heart.
In my very humble opinion, that doesn't leave much except BootX for the
"general user" with an OldWorld Mac. Fortunately, BootX "just works" on
all the models of Oldworld Macs that I've tried it on. I recommend you
give it a try.
Enjoy!
Rick
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