Re: APUS Debian Boot-Floppies Images and bugs
On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 08:20:48AM -0500, Christian T. Steigies wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 02:45:28PM +0200, Sven LUTHER wrote:
> > On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 11:57:11AM +0100, Alan Buxey wrote:
> > > hi,
> > >
> > > > Can you boot from an external 1.76MB floppy ?
> > >
> > > yes. its treated just as the old classic external floppies that I'm sure
> > > most people had with their A500's
> > >
> > > > but 1.76MB floppies would be easily supported, almost nothing needs to be
> > > > changed, apart from the rescue disk creation. Does someone with a 1.76MB
> > > > floppy volunteer for that ?
> > >
> > > if you give me the instructions and details I can test this.
> >
> > Well, just format a floppy disk, but the bootstrap program on it, a linux
> > kernel (in compressed form) and a little script that will boot it, from a
> > ramdisk.
> Don't you need some part of AmigaOS to make a floppy bootable?
no, you just have to make it bootable with install, i think.
> Doesn't at least amiboot need some libraries to be present on the system you
> are booting from?
mmm, yes, i think at least the powerup libraries, which reside on the powerup
boards, at least in their blizzard edition. There may be some others, but i am
sure you can fit them in the 1.76-1.44 = 320Ko you have left after you put the
kernel there. (and geert spoke of less than 500ko m68k modular kernels).
And remember those days when you didn't had harddisks on your amiga.
> Can all hardware already be set up by the kernel?
Sure, i guess at least most of it could. Maybe for some of the graphic cards
this is not the case, but people in this case just could boot from the
harddisk anyway.
> How do you get the image on the floppy, from linux? From AmigaOS? It
> probably has to be done on an amiga to use the 1.76MB drives (or on a PC
> with a catweasel controller, even less probable).
Well, you just make a 1.76MB tarball, that can be unzipped/copied on the
floppy disk by the user.
Also i guess with an amiga hardware, the floppy is accesible under linux, so
you could dd it to it. At least this is the case with my 880Ko floppy.
> So I guess you need an Amgia, running AmigaOS, to create these floppies, to
> then be able to boot from those floppies. Probably we will not be allowed to
No, you just need an amiga running amigaos or linux.
> ship those floppies or even images of them, due to copyright reasons, so
> every user has to create them himself.
No, don't think so, not sure though.
Amiboot/apusboot is GPled (i think, but anyway, we already ship it in the
boot-floppies package) as is the kernel. The little script would be just
anything you want it to be, i guess you could GPL it also.
Sure you would not have GUI or workbench or ... but it would work.
> Due you really think this is worth it, considering how unreliable floppies
> are? Please tell me when I am too pessimistic ;-)
It is easy to do (i think, will have to test though). I don't think a lot of
people will use it, but it could come in handy in some cases, i guess.
What do you do actually, you just copy all needed stuff to your harddisk and
work from there. In the case of not having a amiga partition, you just boot
into a workbench boot floppy, copy the kernel and amiboot to ramdisk, and
launch it from there.
> No, I don't have a HD floppy drive, only with the catweasel controller, and
> no driver for it exists yet.
Yes, i have it also not.
It is worth a try though, don't you think, especially if people with it
volunteer to do it.
> And no, I will not put a new harddisk into my old Amiga, even if I had to set
> up a system from scratch, I could very well use a bootable MOD, but maybe
> more users have HD drives than MOs...
;)))
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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