On Fri, Feb 23, 2001 at 07:48:17PM +0100, Michael Schmitz wrote: > > I'd venture a guess Apple's mindset about openness on hardware and OS > software issues has fostered an equal mindset in other software companies > working for the MacOS market. I should have been more explicit about that. probably so, but not really any worse then what MS has done on its side of the fence. > I know. But most of the PPC users are perhaps already Apple and MacOS > users, and approach a Debian installation with the expectation that Debian > installs side to side with MacOS using very MacOS like tools with MacOS > GUI. Write a MacOS based yaboot or quik installer and they'll happily > forget BootX ever existed. (No, I'm not seriously insinuating you should > do that. Not even that someone should do that. Just to demonstrate what I > think the user perspective is. And I still think Debian is for just those > users - with things like apt for hassle free upgrades and all.) i tend to disagree here, only if those users are ready and willing to eschew the idea that everything can be installed and configured and used from MacOS are they ready for Debian or any GNU/Linux. this is why i firmly believe that writing a GUI MacOS based installer or bootloader, or bootloader installer would be severly non-productive and a pure disaster. all it will accomplish is getting more people with linux installs that have NO CLUE what to do with them, normally these are filtered out by the small learning curve and jump from MacOS MouseLand to get the system installed and booting, if they get past that hurdle they are probably ready for the rest. take away that hurdle and you just end up with 10 times more lame questions on irc and mailing lists about how to configure the network from macos, and how to configure and start apache from macos etc etc. GNU/Linux is not a replacement for MacOS, it does not run side by side to MacOS and never will be no matter what some people think. > But that's getting quickly off-topic. We won't get a free StuffIt for > Linux, not even a non-free one. We won't use the format. If you want > BinHex encoded BootX components for the install CD I'll be happy to > provide them (if BenH doesn't beat me to it). I still keep a mosty unused > copy of BootX 1.2.2 around. i think a macbinary version on the CD would be useful since it can be extracted with Free tools on both the MacOS and GNU/Linux side. (via hfsutils) i have a Free macbinary utilty i can point you to for MacOS that would be useful to include on the CD if a .bin version is present there. (i believe the source is purely in the public domain iirc, either that or something BSDish in its Freeness) -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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