Re: BootX and the Stuffit Fiasco.
On Monday 26 February 2001 11:54, Ethan Benson wrote:
> > I believe that there's a MacGZip (or something like that), but i'm not
> > sure it knows how to write Mac resource forks. I sure hope *something*
> > can be provided that avoids requiring one to get some StuffIt variant.
> > I don't mind of people distribute self-extracting archives, just don't
> > expect/force the users to have to deal with a commercial vendor.
>
> now that MacOS is being obsoleted by OSX nothing special is needed
> anymore, good ol tar and gzip will do quite nicely. (OSX installs
> onto UFS so the resource fork crap must be going away)
heh, right, we all wish that were the case, but it's not. Last time I
installed OS X, it still used HFS, which means that while apple is phasing
them out, their presence is still so predominant that they just can't afford
such a sudden snap in compatability.
Debian should continue to offer the path of installing base from a hard drive
partition, because it is sometimes difficult to get a Debian CD to boot from.
Example: Joe buys a used PPC machine to run Debian on, it doesn't have
anything on it, but a copy of Netscape 3.x is on a cd that came with it along
with a copy of MacOS 7.5.5, and it connects to the internet fine.
Joe is in luck, because Netscape 3 knows how to decode binhex on the fly
(but not macbinary). Foofy downloads a binhexed self-extracting archive of
bootx and can get the ramdisk and kernel, and can proceed to install.
I've put a BootX archive in self-extracting binhex format up. If you have a
MacOS partition laying around with a browser, try this link and see if your
browser decodes the binhex on the fly.. you should end up with a self
extracting archive with the bootx app and sources..
http://www.rm-r.net/~sam/BootX_1.2.2.sea.hqx
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