Open Firmware booting on Blue G3

[Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>]

hello,

I am wondering if the Debian PPC distribution is going to (or working 
on) supporting macos-free Open Firmware booting on a Blue G3 or iMac.

This is what I know so far about booting these machines:

OF requires what Apple calls a "bootfile" this is basically a OF script.

it is possible to boot a NetBSD kernel from a FAT, HFS, HFS+, ISO9660 
filesystem, directly from OF.

I can point OF at a linux kernel (the linuxppc BlueG3 kernel) and OF 
will reject it.  OF also rejects quik.

I think all that is required is making quik OF compliant then it can 
take care of booting the kernel.

is there any work on this?  I hope Debian is not going to be a BootX 
only distribution like LinuxPPC is...

I realize that most macs have broken OF implementations, however, the 
BlueG3s and iMacs have a much better OF as far as i can determine, it 
would be great if these could be macos-free bootable.



Best Regards,
Ethan Benson
To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/