Re: installing debian ppc
> >Second request: does someone know how to write unix files in 'rawmode' for
> >to pmac floppies (on pmac)? Prep uses msdos?
>
> On pmac it is easier to use the kernel image with embedded initrd
> image. That can just be copied onto a HFS formatted floppy. That
> image can also be used for netbooting.
This is also true for chrp and prep. But we will use ext2 for the ramdisk
floppy. This is also an image. So the user must know how to write this image
to an floppy from macos. And if we do this for the modules/ramdisk floppies,
why not also for the boot-floppy (with the initrd kernel)?
> >Has somone tested BootX?
>
> I have tested BootX with a ramdisk.image.gz built by the
> boot-floppies, dinstall/dbootstrap had problems at the time so it
> didn't work too well.
I'm working on it to have the ramdisk.image.gz available. I'm not happy with
the section in the boot-floppies package, where the initrd extension is
generated. A 'standalone' coff binary for pmac are much better. It is also
possible to generate every kernel-image with initrd support, but then must the
user add 'noinitrd' to the boot command from OF if he will not use the
ramdisk for booting.
> >OF on pmac can't boot elf-images, it will have the coff format?
>
> Besides the iMac and the "Blue and White" Power Macintosh G3, that is
> correct. binutils supports it as the "xcoff-powermac" output format,
> but powerpc-*-linux-gnu targets don't get support for that format by
> default (the kernel source uses a `hack-coff' program to convert
> "aixcoff-rs6000" format to "xcoff-powermac" format). It is a quite
> simple matter to get binutils to support "xcoff-powermac" for
> powerpc-*-linux-gnu targets, basically a one-liner patch.
Hmmm, sorry i don't understand this. When will us help this? One generic
powerpc-kernel-image for all powerpc subarchs and all booting the elf format
is on the way (but not for linux-2.2.x :-(
Thanks,
Hartmut
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