Re: booting from openfirmware
On Mon, Feb 7, 2000, Logan Hall <Logan.Hall@asu.edu> wrote:
>What computers does the SystemDisk tool support? I have a Biege G3
tower (the
>ones that shipped just before they switched to B&W). Also will the
SystemDisk
>tool work to boot linux at all? I use BootX right now but I am looking into
>other ways to boot Linux because I want to move to MacOS X when it comes out
>and so I doubt i will beable to continue using BootX. I have tried booting
>from OF but i get Claim Failed! errors. Is there a complete guide to getting
>Linux booted from OF?
SystemDisk supports almost all PCI powermacs (except maybe a few
performa-like machines).
It can be used to edit manually the OF variables, so virtually it can
boot any OF-based OS. The patches it installs should make OF booting on
old machines more reliable.
It's possible that in an undated future, SystemDisk will directly support
choosing Linux in the list of possible OSes (actually boot devices). But
I can't promise for now.
In all cases, as soon as the new Darwin is out, I'll work hard into
making a triple-boot solution that supports MacOS X, MacOS classic and
Linux. I'll eventually add support for Linux booting in MacOS X
bootloader. (The only issue I see so far is that it won't be able to load
the kernel from ext2. The ext2 library is GPL, not LGPL, and so will
conflict with the licence Apple uses for their stuffs. I may be able to
work around this by loading a secondary bootstrap however).
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