Hello all,
On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 09:02:06PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> The boot.img are the miboot floppies for oldworld pmacs. These are saddly not
> useable in sarge, because miboot is non-free (due to the one boot block which
> is coming directly from apple and has a couple tens of m68k assembly
> instructions nobody could be bothered to reverse-enginneer).
I seem to recall this wasn't the only legal problem:
- since miboot requires a non-free compiler to build (and changing
that would be quite difficult,) it couldn't be part of Debian proper;
- miboot itself uses free-as-in-beer libraries from Apple, which are
shipped together with the source code, so we would have to ask
miboot's author to add an exception for them to its licensing terms,
which he hadn't done yet, though comments in the source distribution
seemed to indicate he's aware of the problem.
(all IIRC, would need some checking)
I had some hope when mkvmlinuz, which claims to work for oldworld macs,
was added to Debian, however I never managed to make it work.
To the OP: you may want to try woody on your machine, whose installer
works reasonably well, and upgrade to sarge from there. You may need to
tweak the boot floppy to add or remove "video=ofonly" from the kernel
command-line, if you encounter problems when booting the image.
I know this email is very late. I haven't been able to put any work into
the oldworld stuff for a very long time, and resumed my occasional
reading of debian-boot only recently. I'd like to take this opportunity
to say I'm feeling a bit sorry for leaving this work unfinished. While
it's quite clear it won't happen in the next few months, I hope (once
more) I will eventually be able to change that.
Sven (or anyone else), in the meantime, I'd be happy to test stuff for
you (please request via direct e-mail.) And that crappy old machine is
yours if you want to do some work on it (but I'd say playing nethack
would be a more constructive way of wasting your time :-)
And to everyone here: d-i is a piece of fine art, thanks for your work !
--
Jeremie Koenig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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