On Monday, September 27, 2004, at 03:13 PM, Sebastiaan Molenaar wrote:
On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 05:42, Rick Thomas wrote:
Actually, miboot is a fully-fledged bootloader. The only thing it
needs is a very small HFS partition to run out of (just big enough
for the initrd image and the compressed kernel -- plus the miboot
program itself, of course!). It masquerades as a "System" file and
fools the oldWorld Mac boot-ROM into loading it as if it were.
Once loaded, it turn around and loads the kernel and initrd -- then
gets out of the way.
Hmm, would be slightly better than BootX then.
Still a pain to change kernels regularly though......
What is the problem to get quik to work actually?
Is Apple not giving some info?
Greetz,
Seb.
You can do the installation of new kernels from inside Linux, and
never have to mess with MacOS at all. Get the miboot documentation
and read-up on using it. It may not be as much of a problem as you
think to change kernels.
I'm not sure what the problem with quik is, actually. I've avoided
using it because it requires messing with Open Firmware. The
various OldWorld Apple Open Firmware implementations have too many
bugs/restrictions (different for each different machine type!) And
those bugs can leave you unexpectedly with an unbootable machine...
to me, it just doesn't seem worth while spending the time on it
given that BootX works so well for me.
The Debian developers use quik (and avoid miboot and BootX) for
reasons of political correctness. BootX and miboot use some binary
code that is lifted verbatim from Apple's boot disks. They are
therefor "not free" of Apple's intellectual property. In other
words, they can't be placed under the GPL. Part of the reason
people like Debian is that the developers are very scrupulous in
making sure that everything they distribute is under GPL (or
better) licensing terms.
Fortunately, these restrictions do not apply to you or me as
end-users. We are perfectly free to mix Debian software with
"non-free" software if we choose.
Enjoy!
Rick
