On Saturday, December 11, 2004, at 01:22 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 12:50:21AM -0500, Rick_Thomas wrote:Ralf,
Are you willing/able to install a small MacOS (8 or 9, not X) partition
on these machines? If so, you can use the BootX bootloader. If you
don't know about it, it's a MacOS app that loads a Linux kernel and
ramdisk, along with a boot-time parameter string. BootX provides
essentially all the important functionality of yaboot for NewWorld Macs
or grub/lilo for x86s.
Bah, you are proposing the ugly non-free solution, shame on you :)
"Ugly" and "non-free" are valid arguments against BootX. That's why I said "willing/able". As with all religions, people come in a variety of degrees of religiosity on this subject. I understand and completely support anyone who finds themselves un-"willing/able" to envision themselves using a Linux system that needs MacOS for a few seconds at startup time. But I'm not one of them. And I think that everyone should understand the trade-offs before they make their choices. If you are willing/able to put up with the quirks of quik, then more power to you! "There is an easier way", is all I'm saying.
Seriously, he has the miboot floppies working, so why would he need bootx ?
Seriously, to boot his system after it's installed on his hard disk.
There are four different bootloaders for Macs. One is yaboot, which only works on NewWorld machines. The others are miboot, quik, and BootX, which work on OldWorld machines, but not on NewWorld.
For technical reasons having to do with the details of how OldWorld Macs
get driver software for their boot devices, the miboot bootloader will
never be useful for anything but floppy disk booting. Even if the
cleanroom re-implementation project gets off the ground and produces a
working bootloader, this will not change.
Sure, but we are speaking initial installation, afterward you are supposed to
use quik.
Yup. And quik will work -- assuming that the fix for booting with an initrd makes it into the sarge distribution. And assuming that he has the fortitude to look up and install the OF patches that are required for his particular hardware. And assuming that he can deal with the fact that those patches will disappear and have to be re-installed every time he zaps the PRAM, or boots MacOS for any reason, or his cmos-battery gets tired and has to be replaced -- a fairly common occurrence with old Macs -- or a host of other more obscure reasons.
Quik gets around this problem by using Open Firmware to access its boot
devices. However, until recently, quik did not support initial
ramdisks. This makes it useless for booting any of the stock 2.6 based
kernels. There is, apparently, in the works an attempt to fix this.
But it's not clear that the fix will make it into the distribution
before sarge is released. Even if a fixed quik makes it possible to
boot 2.6 kernels from a hard disk or over a network, quik's inherent
reliance on specialized model-dependent patches to the Open Firmware
makes me think that it's not (and never will be) for the faint of heart.
It works rather well, for woody only one model was listed as not supporting
quik.
Quik works OK. I have two production machines booting with quik in my Lab at work. It's just a pain in the #$% to make it work and keep it working. There is an easier way. That's all I'm saying.
In my very humble opinion, that doesn't leave much except BootX for the
"general user" with an OldWorld Mac. Fortunately, BootX "just works" on
all the models of Oldworld Macs that I've tried it on. I recommend you
give it a try.
Well, debian can't recomend it,
I understand that. I'm not Debian. I can recommend it. I do. YMMV. (<-8)
and many will not have or not want mac os
anymore, or like me, are saddled with a greek localised mac os, which is not
really all that fun to use. Well, probably good oportunity to learn greek you
would say :)
Actually, I would say it's a good opportunity to learn to use e-bay, and buy one of those $10 copies of MacOS that seem to be for sale there. On the other hand, I understand Greece is warm this time of year, and the people are friendly... (<-8)
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Enjoy!
Rick
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