-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 12:48:57 +0200 Sven Luther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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 > > The official method of booting oldworld powermacs is using the miboot > floppies, and altough miboot is currently non-free, work is under way I beg to differ. The manual for sarge didn't mention miboot floppies at all (because they're non-free and apparently can't even be in non-free). CD booting doesn't work on old world (requires non-free apple boot code), and netboot only works with built-in ethernet cards (and not on all systems with them). That leaves BootX, which was also non-free, but didn't require debian directly use it (unlike the miBoot floppies). > to free it, and there are other people here who are working on > bettering the floppies, please participate to that effort or > something. I intend to do what I can, but I don't think we should claim to support something that we can't, at least not officially. > BootX was not a recomended way to boot those machines as far as i am > concerned. See above > 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. How would this work? By setting boot-device and boot-file? I'd try this, but mkvmlinuz complains about the coff format in the initrd. > So what would you gain by dropping support ? We wouldn't be claiming to support something that isn't actually supported, namely installation on old world mac. Also, if the kernel situation doesn't get resolved, old world mac won't be supported in etch. - -- And that's my crabbing done for the day. Got it out of the way early, now I have the rest of the afternoon to sniff fragrant tea-roses or strangle cute bunnies or something. -- Michael Devore -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFEta3shvWBpdQuHxwRArJ4AJ9o+PyYMOtoVxvI6F7E+BhgCAHZlwCffWou ysPpcsOVjYbh5odVPQwtnFw= =saxF -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
