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

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

  1. a small file, the boot1 macos ressource, a 1K boot-sector to be copied to the floppy boot sector, is taken from the mac os system file. This is non-free, binary only, altough, well, the file in question only contains some ROM calls to initialize HFS, and load the boot2, open the mac os system file, and load boot2, which is provided by the GPL-free part of miboot mentioned above.

Worse case scenario, this could be clean-room reimplemented.

To do it, you need two MacOS hackers.

Hacker #1 looks at the existing boot sector, writes a complete plain English description of it, and posts it to debian-boot and/or debian-powerpc.

Hacker #2 affirms that he has never looked at the existing boot sector, and will not do so in the future. He or she understands MacOS well enough to know how to hand-code 1kB worth of assembly (or possibly compilable C code) to create a functionally-identical boot sector from the plain English description.

-- G. Branden Robinson | Religion is excellent stuff for Debian GNU/Linux | keeping common people quiet. branden@debian.org | -- Napoleon Bonaparte http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |

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