On Aug 19, 2005, at 9:35 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 05:00:44AM -0300, Rog?rio Brito wrote:On Aug 18 2005, Sven Luther wrote:I was forced to disable the floppy builds for now, since they failed tobuild, and the 2.6.12 kernels are 200K too big anyway for miboot floppies, we need to find out how to make them smaller, and solve the non-freeness of miboot for the etch release.Humm, this is indeed a problem. :-( The non-freeness of miboot is a secondary problem in face of not having a way to install the operating system on the box. :-(The kernel don't fit anyway, and you can always use the sarge miboot floppies, or older daily builds and then upgrade, or use bootx with the normal installation,or even boot the .cofg kernel from OF directly.
Hmmm...Would it be possible to build a boot floppy using a fixed-config stripped-down version of (say) the 2.4 kernel, with just enough features configured to get the "real" (e.g. 2.6.xxx) kernel off one of: CD, network, hard-disk, whatever media. It asks the user where the "real" kernel is, then retrieves it, loads it, and passes control to it. As proof of concept, it could use the non-free miboot until a free version becomes available.
NewWorld Macs can boot off of CDs, so these boot floppies are only necessary for OldWorld PowerMacs, which, being out of production, have a fixed unchanging set of devices. So the "initial boot" kernel can be built with a fixed minimal unchanging configuration. Once a working config is constructed, there will never be any need to update it.
What am I missing? Rick