Re: installing debian ppc
On Fri, Feb 26, 1999 at 04:11:02PM -0800, Peter Abrahamsen wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Feb 1999, Hartmut Koptein wrote:
>
> > > We'd do this via disk images, the same way the m68k people make Mac
> > > boot disks.
> > Correct, but how put you this image on floppy (on pmac and macos)? It is an
> > image, so you can't do 'cp rescue-1440 floppy:' it must be in rawmode or
> > with dd.
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but this should be dead easy. We give users a
> vmlinux.coff and root.bin file, they put them on disks and set boot-device
> to fd:vmlinux.coff, boot-file to ' initrd=root.bin'. Is there anything wrong
> with this process? They would need OF Boot Variables for macos, of course.
> If we feel like it, we could distribute the files as HFS diskcopy/shrinkwrap
> -style disk images.
> The only problem I can think of is what to do with non-macos users. What
> other operating systems might people be running? Do all PPC machines that we
> support use OF and have HFS support within it? We may have to make different
> images for them, but that should not be hard.
> If someone wants, I could go ahead and make the HFS images w/ shrinkwrap.
There will probably need to be at least two disks. The first would be
HFS, and contain only one file - the bootloader should not have to deal
with a complete floppy driver! The COFF format supports an embedded
ramdisk.
The other disk could be ext2 formatted, or more like the PC version
(IIRC) a gzipped ramdisk. This would need to be shrinkwrapped- no HFS
at all. Fortunately, this can be produced even without MacOS -
ShrinkWrap can take raw files and write them to disk, given the proper
type/creator. There's no meta-information in one of its existing file
formats. Don't recall the type/creator off the top of my head though.
This would only work for Power Macs. The other (PReP, CHRP)
architectures we support would require their own boot methods, and I
don't know much about that.
Dan
/--------------------------------\ /--------------------------------\
| Daniel Jacobowitz |__| CMU, CS class of 2002 |
| Debian GNU/Linux Developer __ Part-Time Systems Programmer |
| dan@debian.org | | drow@cs.cmu.edu |
\--------------------------------/ \--------------------------------/
Reply to: