Re: BootX and the Stuffit Fiasco.
> > 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.
Except there's plenty of PC hardware companies that freely release data
sheets on for example ethernet hardware, while all attempts to ever get
any substantial information out of, say, Asante have been met with a
friendly mocking 'we'll pass that request to our engineering department'.
Case in point: the SCSI ethernet adapters.
> > 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
>
> 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.
I can see what you mean (reading c.o.l.powerpc does a lot to prove your
point) but that's not really a specific problem of the PowerPC
architecture. The same applies to users switching from Windoze to Linux.
Things like network config and stuff are taken care of by the installer.
Rather expect lots of questions on XF86Config and 'why does my mouse not
work with kernel 2.2.17 (homemade problem of ours, this). I don't think
all these people switching to Linux incapable of using vi have no clue
what to do with the system: Using TeX seems to be a real argument for a
lot of people I'd never have suspected to install Linux before.
> > 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
OK, I'll use hfsutils to convert what I have on my Lombard.
> 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)
I don't think we need to leave the files as .bin on the CD, mkhybrid can
unpack them to the proper format automagically (may be they need to be in
AppleDouble format for that though, but that's just another hfsutils
option).
Michael
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