On Saturday, July 10, 2004, at 07:33 AM, Colin Watson wrote:
On Sat, Jul 10, 2004 at 03:46:29AM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:Everything went like clockwork except that it tried to install the quik bootloader. IT's not supposed to do that for OldWorld machines, is it? This is a beige G3 minitower.quik is an OldWorld bootloader, so yes, it is supposed to do that. Did something go wrong with the bootloader installation?(For what it's worth, if the bootloader installation was successful thenthis will be the first success report we've had with quik-installer, which would be nice.)
Unfortunately, something _did_ go wrong with installing the quik bootloader.
I guess you could say that this was unfortunate for d-i, but it was definitely fortunate for me. I prefer to use macOS-9 and BootX for my bootloader chores on my OldWorld machines; it gives me an implicit dual-boot capability that I like. Also, I don't like the fact that quik mucks about with open-firmware settings; it's just too easy to get a non-bootable system that way.
When the quik install phase failed, I went ahead and told d-i to continue without a bootloader, and everything was easy after that.
Personally, I'd much prefer that d-i not try to install quik by default on OldWorld machines. My reasoning goes this way:
Because of the licensing problems with miboot, it's not possible to distribute a bootable CD or CD/floppy combo for Debian at this time. Aside: It is _possible_ for the end-user to construct a bootable CD and/or CD/floppy-combo using piece parts that are freely available on the web but not free-as-in-speech enough for putting into a Debian distribution. While it is possible, it isn't easy, and it requires tools that are not free by any definition, e.g. MacOS and Toast.
Consequently, the only practical way for the average user to install Debian on an OldWorld machine is with MacOS-9 and BootX.
Given that this makes MacOS/BootX a practical requirement anyway, why muddy the waters with quik? Especially so since we can't seem to get it working in the first place, and in the second place it has distasteful side-effects in that it messes with the Open Firmware in dangerous ways?
I know it's possible to bypass quik by installing with DEBCONF_PRIORITY=medium, but I wanted to try the default setup to see if there were problems that the normal user would encounter. The answer is: There is a problem.
Enjoy! Rick