Re: Debian-installer, older hardware, boot loaders, miboot & amiboot & .. (original) (raw)

On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 09:16:14AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:

The problematic file comes in a mac .sit format, is claimed to be GPL by the author, and include the source in the above mentioned .sit (no idea though, since i have no mac to look at them). There are various problems though :

  1. to build those files, not only a mac system is needed, but also an older version of the code warrior compiler.

Yes, and it seems quite hard to circumvent.

=> would mean contrib probably, but debian-installer is in main.

The plan was to request a sarge-ignore tag on the "d-i build-depends on miboot, which is in contrib", and try to find a better solution for next releases.

Well, i, and the upstream author too, think that it should be possible to rewrite this small boot sector yourself. This would need good oldworld pmac knowledge, which i don't have. It seems only a small part of the 1K boot-sector is used. No idea what the source code of this would look like. Jeremie, if it came to that, since you seem to have some of the knowledge and the hardware, would you feel like investigating this ?

It sounds like something possible, however it'd be quite hard and I'm not sure it'd be the most urgent thing.

I'd first make miBoot buildable with free tools, then write a boot sector specifically targetted at it. Then we could have miBoot in main, but not before. Still it'd be a big amount of work (I'm not such a knowledgeable guy about oldworld, I never used such a machine before I tried to make it boot d-i.)

Do we have a response or a strategie for those cases, except the "give instructions for the user to build the stuff himself from various URLS", which was used, if i remember well, for miboot in boot-floppies.

No, miBoot and the said boot block used to sit around in the boot-floppies source code, without any license or source code. I'd say the legal situation will be improved much already !

Would it be really problematic to upload the boot block along with miboot in contrib or non-free ?

-- Jeremie Koenig sprite@sprite.fr.eu.org

Reply to: