Le mar 2005-08-16 a 18:37:30 -0400, Rick Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a dit: > > It's clear that, as a practical matter, Apple doesn't mind if people > distribute the "boot block which is coming directly from Apple and > has a couple tens of m68k assembly instructions nobody could be > bothered to reverse-engineer", because other Linux distributions > provide it and Apple has not sued them. So it would seem that the
yeh, true, but better to avoid that, if at all possible. > only thing keeping it out of the Debian/PPC distribution is the > Debian Freeness guidelines. I respect the guidelines, and wouldn't > want to go against them, but it seems a shame that we can't find a > practical solution to this. there's a good reason for that, foresight. i mean, i'd rather know this thing won't would "patent encumbered" the way we don't like it, and get fucked over. > Would it be possible to have an otherwise fully functioning boot > floppy image minus the "non-free" part? Then someone, while > disclaiming all connection with Debian except as an interested > observer, could put the "non-free" part on a website somewhere with > instructions for combining the two into a functioning boot floppy? sounds interesting, then we can start doing that with the reverse engineered one, for testing :). making it modular would be neat, and also useful. > Rick > > > only trivial if you happen to have the necessary coding and > de-coding skills and the necessary background in calling Apple's OF > boot-rom routines. People with those skills are few and far > between. And acquiring them from scratch for this project is i think several of the kernel hackers know a bit about this ;). > definitely non-trivial. That's why I didn't volunteer. I don't > have the skills and I don't have the time to acquire them. i personally am aware of this, this is why i talk of it freely, because i would like to stir up interest, frankly. > Maybe we should establish a bounty for someone to reverse-engineer > the Apple floppy boot block. That might get somebody with the > necessary skills to come out of the woodwork... If ten of us put up > US$100, would that be enough? see my previous to sven about a potential person, and maybe a bounty would be nice for this. there are many older macs that work just fine and have no "DRM" encumbrance but with a little TLC would work really nice. h/w hacking them can come from the work we (we as community) do, but i have the awareness that's a medium-term goal. probably a few years. 1) year for decode/encode reverse engineering, 2) replace the rom on a box, like a 7300-7500 on up, with a right-sized eeprom (3 MB IIRC) (no idea, never done such a thing, but someone with the skills probably a few / several weeks of planning and tweaking, then "first burn" so to speak 3) we can potentially play with a sacrificial scsi card, that has FCode on it, and replace it with one that has the right code in the rom so newworlds can boot from it. (adaptec 2940) oh, the ideas... but yeh, there's a few things we can do. rushing before a release isn't a hot idea, and it's certainly medium if not long term. simon -- | http://www.antiracistaction.ca/ | | http://pentangle.nuit.ca/ezine/vol_x/x0305.html | | http://home.earthlink.net/~wodensharrow/hah.html |
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