miboot floppies and non-free apple boot sector.

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

On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 10:14:31AM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
> > Well, just wait, i will soon come here to debian-legal with the problem
> > sourunding miboot and its non-free boot sector pilfered from age old apple
> > floppies.
> 
> Didn't that get mentioned here already?  I thought somebody

Yes, but as usual, much talk, and nothing really happened, and its being a
pain since it is needed for distributing debian installer in a form which is
suitable for oldworld pmac installations.

> volunteered to talk to Apple and see if they'd formally relinquish
> copyright to the 20-or-so bytes of magic to boot their old powerpcs?

I think the real way to solve this is a clean room implementation. Saddly, i
couldn't find anyone knoweldgeable in m68k assembly and apple rom who would be
willing to do at least the first part of the process, so that we can then do
the second. I am still working on that.

The alternative is to use bootx, which needs a fully fledged mac os (pre-X)
install to work, so it is less interesting.

BTW, what about an upload of miboot to non-free ? What would be needed for
that ? A simple permission from apple ? In that way, at least the package
would not get lost, like it almost did, since Jeremie went kind of MIA, and i
couldn't find the miboot source package on any of my harddisks anymore.

Friendly,

Sven Luther