On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 05:12:09AM -0400, Daniel Dickinson wrote: > As you know I've been doing a fair bit of playing around with d-i and debian > on oldworld powerpc macintosh, although I'm only just now getting a > development machine setup. Because of the problems with a lack of dfsg-free > means to boot the installer on old world, the fact that the only method > available for sarge no longer works (BootX; which can't be used on new world > machiens) with 2.6.16 kernels, and that the 2.6.16+ kernels fail to boot on > old world macs, the fact that old world macs are pretty darn old, and the > fact that they're not nearly as common as p1's, for which one hears > occaisional murmurs about creating a light desktop for, but little action), I > am wondering if it makes sense to drop old world mac support altogether. If > not, I'm happy to continue working on it (I've just about got a development > environment set up on a StarMax; the slowness has been due to the vc I'm > using to track /etc, /boot etc requiring more cpu than expected).
The official method of booting oldworld powermacs is using the miboot floppies, and altough miboot is currently non-free, work is under way to free it, and there are other people here who are working on bettering the floppies, please participate to that effort or something. BootX was not a recomended way to boot those machines as far as i am concerned. There are rumors that you can use also a .coff kernel+ramdisk and use that one to boot those boxes, which would be gully free, but nobody ever investigated this. So what would you gain by dropping support ? Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
