Re: your daily build of powerpc floppies
On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 12:50:21AM -0500, Rick_Thomas wrote:
> 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.
Bah, you are proposing the ugly non-free solution, shame on you :)
Seriously, he has the miboot floppies working, so why would he need bootx ?
> 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.
Sure, but we are speaking initial installation, afterward you are supposed to
use quik.
> 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.
It works rather well, for woody only one model was listed as not supporting
quik.
> 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.
Well, debian can't recomend it, and many will not have or not want mac os
anymore, or like me, are saddled with a greek localised mac os, which is not
really all that fun to use. Well, probably good oportunity to learn greek you
would say :)
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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