On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 07:20:25AM +0200, Jeremie Koenig wrote: > 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;
That means it would be in contrib though and not in non-free. > - 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. This doesn't make miboot free, and is not really an issue, since the boot sector is not linked, i belive, but only agregated into the same media. Same as your bios is not linked to lilo. > (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. mkvmlinuz is different, it uses the already existing zImage.coff format, which was in use before quik, yaboot or bootx where around. > 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 :-) I already have some oldworld machine (two in fact, altough one is not connected), but am lacking time. > And to everyone here: d-i is a piece of fine art, thanks for your work ! :) Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
