> Overall, it's a bit tricky to focus on these issues as they are linked > to other more important development that need to be investigated first > so we do not waste time fixing bugs that might become irrelevant. >
I totally understand. I've been wrestling with the Mactel USB stuff and realizing that I shouldn't put in a ton of work to live-USB development before solving this issue one way or another. And that there's a larger community to work for too ;) Now, I am not sure what is the state of the different directions, but I > have the impression that they are all incomplete. The ideal steps now > would be: > > 1. Figure out once and for all if Puredyne can boot via USB on a mactel. > There has been lots of very interesting progress on this reported on > the bug tracker and last year during an Helsinki sprint, I managed to > get quite close (also explained in the bug report). But I don't own a > Mac, so I could not do anything after the sprint. > well i have a roommate with a Macbook Pro and am spending the next week and a half at a house with an iMac (parents). I've read the bug reports, I tried with the info I got from there and seemed to get about as far as you, though there was no Linux partition on it to mess with the initramfs... still hung there. I'm also in contact with c.cobb who posted on the bug report as well, he is back at it too, in a more general fashion. I am guessing it is possible, but these MacTels put a bunch of weird barriers in the way that I have little experience with. 2. If 1. is successful then we need to test if the mactel key can still > boot on a regular PC as well, or what kind of tricks might be possible > to have a unique boot system for both mac and pc. > > 3. Write the software that can generate the right partition table, > bootloader and whatnot for the universal key, or provide an option to > generate either a mac one or a regular pc key. The final software should > preferably be merged with Enrike's code so we can provide a nice CLI + > GUI app. > > Prior to that, it is important to check the status of unetbootin to > avoid duplicate work, I do not know for example if all the steps > required above could be done within their framework, and if that's the > case it would be better to drop our script and contribute to their > software with a Puredyne specific profile or something like that. > personally, i like make-live-device.sh ! its what showed me what is actually going on in the process of making a live USB, and allowed me to problem solve when it inevitably goes wrong with one of the many tools that are out there. However, it is certainly worth checking into. > > I am willing to do the work but probably need some hints as to where to > > begin. > > What do you think of the steps above? > I can give you access to the code repos (writing access) if you want to > start hacking. > > they make sense to me, this is my first real foray into the world of contributing to a project, but after running through the debian-live manual myself and learning a bit about git, i feel like i can at least give it a shot. no better way to learn than by doing. the Mactel issue is proving to be a difficult one, but with c.cobb and others in the community perhaps it can be solved.
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