Re: Debian-installer, older hardware, boot loaders, miboot & amiboot & ..

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 10:36:20AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 10:30:23PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > Sven Luther wrote:
> > > Yes, that's somewhat more of an issue. I'd expect amiboot to be
> > > buildable without excessive effort, although the Amiga includes aren't
> > > Free. We can't really ship amiboot as part of d-i anyway - it's a
> > > loadlin equivilent, not a syslinux one. Amiga-lilo used to exist and
> 
> Amiga-lilo had afaik no support for graphics crads and probably no 060
> support.
> 
> > The main difference being that all the stuff needed are part of the
> > amiga rom, while this is not the case for msdos, if i remember well.
> 
> The rom and system header files are part of the hardware/operating
> system. Iirc the 'syscall' numbers and parameter format is shiped with
> the Amiga Basic. If pulling a few function offsets needed for amiboot
> (a few '#define open_library -236') out of a hat isn't legally good
> enough, they could be extracted from there. That should cover the legal
> side even if the C header are not falling under the "distributed with
> the OS" part. They can also be taken out of the many programming books
> or for Amigas.

Well, the FSF folk told me that header files containing this kind of
info cause no problem, provided you write it yourself, and strip the
comments. At least this was the case for the amiga RDB code i
contributed to libparted (and assigned copyright to the FSF), so i guess
they know what they are talking about.
> 
> > I think that the easiest way would be to have a amiga bootable
> > partition, with amiboot and the auto-executing amiga shell script needed
> > to launch it. This may all be installable from linux, provided either i
> > finish the affs create implementation in libparted, or we package Roman
> > Zippel's mkaffs. This would be a rather clean way of doing this, and you
> > can even rely on the early amiga-rom based boot selector, and play with
> > boot priorities to have it auto loaded or go to amiga os.
> 
> You need a RGDB, which parted can create, a OFS formated partition (or

which parted can create now :)

> the l:filesystem) for old roms (newer roms have affs), the shell
> script, the amiboot, the 68040.library or the 68060.library +
> 68040dummy.library, the setpatch and the device driver for various
> graphics cards.

Um, those libraries are probably non-free. Or possibly in accelerator
boards flash roms ? No static linking is possible ? 

> Forget about booting linux without going through the already installed
> AmigaOS. The best you can do is clone the existing system into a new
> boot partition or provide an Amiga Installer script to aid installing
> under nativ AmigaOS (which is actually quite easy to write).

BTW, could you test the new apus kernels (2.4.25) on your apus box ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther