Bug#323182: a bit more about miboot's legal status
On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 07:20:25AM +0200, Jeremie Koenig wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 09:02:06PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > The boot.img are the miboot floppies for oldworld pmacs. These are saddly not
> > useable in sarge, because miboot is non-free (due to the one boot block which
> > is coming directly from apple and has a couple tens of m68k assembly
> > instructions nobody could be bothered to reverse-enginneer).
>
> I seem to recall this wasn't the only legal problem:
> - since miboot requires a non-free compiler to build (and changing
> that would be quite difficult,) it couldn't be part of Debian proper;
That means it would be in contrib though and not in non-free.
> - miboot itself uses free-as-in-beer libraries from Apple, which are
> shipped together with the source code, so we would have to ask
> miboot's author to add an exception for them to its licensing terms,
> which he hadn't done yet, though comments in the source distribution
> seemed to indicate he's aware of the problem.
This doesn't make miboot free, and is not really an issue, since the boot
sector is not linked, i belive, but only agregated into the same media. Same
as your bios is not linked to lilo.
> (all IIRC, would need some checking)
>
> I had some hope when mkvmlinuz, which claims to work for oldworld macs,
> was added to Debian, however I never managed to make it work.
mkvmlinuz is different, it uses the already existing zImage.coff format, which
was in use before quik, yaboot or bootx where around.
> To the OP: you may want to try woody on your machine, whose installer
> works reasonably well, and upgrade to sarge from there. You may need to
> tweak the boot floppy to add or remove "video=ofonly" from the kernel
> command-line, if you encounter problems when booting the image.
>
> I know this email is very late. I haven't been able to put any work into
> the oldworld stuff for a very long time, and resumed my occasional
> reading of debian-boot only recently. I'd like to take this opportunity
> to say I'm feeling a bit sorry for leaving this work unfinished. While
> it's quite clear it won't happen in the next few months, I hope (once
> more) I will eventually be able to change that.
>
> Sven (or anyone else), in the meantime, I'd be happy to test stuff for
> you (please request via direct e-mail.) And that crappy old machine is
> yours if you want to do some work on it (but I'd say playing nethack
> would be a more constructive way of wasting your time :-)
I already have some oldworld machine (two in fact, altough one is not
connected), but am lacking time.
> And to everyone here: d-i is a piece of fine art, thanks for your work !
:)
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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