On Fri, Jul 07, 2000 at 01:25:40PM -0500, Jim wrote: > > > Yeah, the LinuxPPC 2000 CD boots great on an old-world powermac, using what > looks to me like miBoot... but Debian is so much nicer. yes it does use miboot, that is what miboot was designed for. however the implementation has several problems that make it unsuitable for Debian: it requires a non-free proprietary Apple CD driver on the CD. this is the bugger for debian. unlike other distributions debian is committed to Free software, completly. it requires the main partition to be real HFS, this means that no .debs can be kept on the first CD since many of them have filenames longer then 31 characters. debian's dpkg/dselect/apt developers are not going to insert kludges to deal with broken, trunicated filenames. the extra driver partitions also make mounting the CD under linux less reliable (it often does not work, and does not work at all on 2.3 kernels) [0] linuxppc CD images are generated with non-free software on macos, this is not acceptable to a distribution like Debian. debian does however have working, macos-free boot floppies which provide a very intel like [1] bootstrap experience for the oldworld powermacs. [0] the newworld boot CDs are a single partition with a fake partition table with hybrid ISO9660/HFS filesystem. the hybrid ISO has no problems with long filenames (with rockridge anyway) this also provides no unreliability or problems mounting the CD under linux (as ISO9660 of course) [1] read easy and painless. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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