At 5:57 PM -0500 1/31/01, Ralph Dratman wrote:
>Why is the install of NetBSD-macppc so, uh, thrillingly exciting and 
>challenging? I've been, um, enjoying the effort for several days now.

;-)

>Listening to those very nice "bong" sounds at reboot. It just enters 
>my mind... and this might be ridiculous... that with all the agony 
>imposed by Open (sic) Firmware, would it make more sense to just 
>*bypass* OF and use some kind of fake System/Finder on a CD that 
>would boot via the standard Mac path, then switch over to the NetBSD 
>installer?

Well our FAQ maintainer has made wonderful progress with documenting 
how to adjust to all the variations in OF we have to deal with.

>I apologize if this or a similar question has been asked a thousand 
>times. I tried searching the archives but was not finding anything 
>along these lines.

Usually it comes up as:  gee it would be nice if someone would make 
NetBSD boot from BootX.  The latter is under GPL, but it could be 
handled the same way we handle gcc & friends, and the author has said 
he will accept NetBSD patches.  Also BootX will boot the older, 
non-OF PPC Macs giving us a route to supporting them with derivatives 
of the Mac68k drivers.

The down side is that BootX is not a NetBSD product and all of us 
understand the tools we have a lot better than we understand BootX.

Feel like working on any of this stuff?  Then you get to choose how to fix it!


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