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 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