On Mon, May 15, 2000 at 11:14:35AM +0100, Björn Johansson wrote: > > I should be able to use these cd:s with Dselect, right? A friend of mine > burned a couple of cd:s with *a lot* of packages, so he burned down all > the packages directly from the ftp. Maybe the method with the big > files(ISO-images) on each cd works better? so long as the debian hierarchy and packages.gz files are in place correctly dselect should accept them fine yes, if its just a bunch of packages tossed loose onto a CD then no it won't work. > Since I have an Amiga, no Mac, I won't be able to use this feature(booting > from CD), not because the Amiga can't boot CD:s, but because they use > different loaders. But if the software on the CD could recognize the > hardware before initializing the installation, so if it is an Amiga it will > use > bootstrap and if it's a Mac it will use Yaboot(or BootX). But this hardware > recognition would probably require more work than it's worth, and besides, > there's not so many Amiga-Linux users out there, I think? I don't know anything about amigas. it would be nice if the powerpc cds would boot more machines, its just very difficult since there are so many different incompatbile firmwares for all the different powerpc [sub]archetectures... the debian cds should boot Newworld powermacs and PReP (maybe) it would be nice to be able to boot oldworld macs too but that would require non-free Apple CD drivers or a custom written driver that acts as a boot loader, also adding mulitple partitions to a CD makes it impossible to mount under linux as iso9660 (HFS is flakily possible but then we cannot keep any .debs on it without ruining many of the filenames..) also if you add too much stuff to a CD apple's BrokenFirmware will probably start refusing to boot from it, and vise versa... i frankly doubt its even possible to make a bootable CD that will boot all of the powerpc machines. there is just too much diversity and broken firmwares.. fortunatly most of them have floppy drives and the ones that don't (*cough* apple) are Cd bootable. apple machines are probably the most common powerpc machines anyway... -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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