YDL off the cutting edge

[R. Hirschfeld]

Rick,

> Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 14:59:46 -0500
> From: Rick Thomas <rbthomas55 at pobox.com>
> 
> It's unlikely you will ever be able to boot YDL on an OldWorld mac 
> *directly* from CD.  You can't do that now with 3.0 or 3.0.1.  It's 
> technically possible to build a bootable Linux CD for OldWorld 
> machines, but there are licensing issues that make it legally 
> difficult.  So I'll venture to predict that you'll never see such a 
> thing from TeraSoft, or most likely any other Linux distributor.

I didn't mean booting directly from the CD in the sense of miboot or
the like, but rather using BootX after copying the kernel and ramdisk
image from the CD over to MacOS.

> That said, it's not difficult to get Linux running on OldWorld Mac 
> hardware.  The recommended (by me -- others are of different religions) 
> way is with a small MacOS-9 (or MacOS-8) partition and the "BootX" 
> extension.   Email me if you need instructions on how to do this.

Thanks, this part I think I can handle.  It's what I do now with YDL
3.0.1 and Gentoo.

> As far as getting YDL 4.0 running on OldWorld machines:  As I 
> understand it, the issue is that the kernel and initial-ramdisk on the 
> 4.0 CD are missing one or more drivers necessary for OW Macs.  There 
> has been some work by folks on this list to compile a kernel&modules 
> with the necessary stuff, but I'm not sure what degree of success 
> they've had.  Anybody want to comment?

I guess the crux of my question is whether there is any chance that
TerraSoft will include the necessary (unsupported) drivers in future
generic versions of the kernel.

Although I gather that somebody is likely to make a kernel available
for download that has Old World support included, there are a couple
of things I don't like about this approach:

- To configure my own kernel, I need to know exactly what to include
  to keep the Old World support, and that information may or may not
  be supplied by the person who provides the kernel.  If it's included
  in the standard generic configuration, there's nothing to do.

- It requires trust of an additional party (the kernel is a
  particularly nasty place for a Trojan).

Ray