Re: install (boot) problem sarge powerbook G3 (wallstreet)

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 12:30:26AM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
> 
> On Monday, September 27, 2004, at 03:13 PM, Sebastiaan Molenaar wrote:
> 
> >On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 05:42, Rick Thomas wrote:
> >>Actually, miboot is a fully-fledged bootloader.  The only thing it
> >>needs is a very small HFS partition to run out of (just big enough
> >>for the initrd image and the compressed kernel -- plus the miboot
> >>program itself, of course!).  It masquerades as a "System" file and
> >>fools the oldWorld Mac boot-ROM into loading it as if it were.
> >>Once loaded, it turn around and loads the kernel and initrd -- then
> >>gets out of the way.
> >
> >Hmm, would be slightly better than BootX then.
> >Still a pain to change kernels regularly though......
> >What is the problem to get quik to work actually?
> >Is Apple not giving some info?
> >
> >Greetz,
> >Seb.
> 
> 
> You can do the installation of new kernels from inside Linux, and 
> never have to mess with MacOS at all.  Get the miboot documentation 
> and read-up on using it.  It may not be as much of a problem as you 
> think to change kernels.
> 
> I'm not sure what the problem with quik is, actually.  I've avoided 
> using it because it requires messing with Open Firmware. The 
> various OldWorld Apple Open Firmware implementations have too many 
> bugs/restrictions (different for each different machine type!) And 
> those bugs can leave you unexpectedly with an unbootable machine... 
> to me, it just doesn't seem worth while spending the time on it 
> given that BootX works so well for me.
> 
> The Debian developers use quik (and avoid miboot and BootX) for 

I don't know about bootx, but the main problem with miboot apart from the boot
sector which needs to be reverse engineered and cleanly reimplemented, is that
you cannot compile miboot with a free toolchain on linux, and you need an
oldish version of codewarrior running on powermac.

Nobody has really stepped up to help on either of those, despite my call for
help on this since almost a year or so.

The first step for helping with miboot would be for someone to dissassemble
the boot sector, and tell us what it does (i know it does some calls to mac os
rom, nothing more). I can't do this myself since i want to do the clean room
reimplementation later on.

Friendly,

Sven Luther
> reasons of political correctness.  BootX and miboot use some binary 
> code that is lifted verbatim from Apple's boot disks. They are 
> therefor "not free" of Apple's intellectual property. In other 
> words, they can't be placed under the GPL.  Part of the reason 
> people like Debian is that the developers are very scrupulous in 
> making sure that everything they distribute is under GPL (or 
> better) licensing terms.
> 
> Fortunately, these restrictions do not apply to you or me as 
> end-users.  We are perfectly free to mix Debian software with 
> "non-free" software if we choose.
> 
> Enjoy!
> 
> Rick
> 
> 
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