At 5:41 PM -0400 10/26/00, Michael Wolfson wrote:
>At 2:26 PM -0700 10/26/00, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
>
>:)It's really nice to see someone trying to organize all this
>:)information.  Many mucho thanks!!!!!!!

Ditto.

>:)What follows are nits.  As Bob Nestor says we need to have a simple
>:)set of instructions that will *work* before we can start exploring
>:)all the special cases.
>
>Unfortunately, after trying that, I found that OF has more exceptions than
>rules (kinda like the English language).  Instead, I broke it down into

|-(  I know.  Breakdown by OF version is a good way to do it.  Simple 
means as simple as we can make it and still have it *work*.

>instructions for each different classes of OF (1.0.5 and 2.0.x, 1.1.22,
>2.4, and 3) as within each class, most everything is the same.

I think that's actually 3.1.1.22.  There's an extra space in the 
version string that shouldn't be there.  I'm writing this on my G4 or 
I'd go check.

>:)I wouldn't be too sure this is true.  I know you can boot from a
>:)plain ISO CD-ROM with some caveats like type the filename in caps and
>:)such.
>
>OK, good.  I've had two people tell me that they can't even get their OF
>2.0.1 PowerBooks to boot a pure ISO CD.  I've had no problems with a
>Toast-created ISO CD on my OF 1.0.5 machine.

I created a Toast test CD and it worked on a 7500 but not on an 8500. 
I think it was the all-caps that was the issue, but I never verified 
that.

>Personally, I'm leaning towards distributing a hybrid CD with the boot
>floppy image and the MacOS tool to write that to disk.  That way, they've
>got a boot floppy and a CD with the dist sets, and OF 3 people can just
>boot it.

Reasonable if it still covers the beige G3 folks with OF 2.0.  They 
don't have floppy, or floppy booting is broken?

>:)The fact that you can boot from a MacOS OS CD proves that ISO
>:)is not the only CD-ROM option on these machines.
>
>Not necessarily, since those models (pre OF 3) load the MacOS ROM first
>before trying to boot from CD.

Well Bob Nestor believes that you should be able to boot NetBSD from 
a HFS CD-ROM inside the MacOS ROM (on OF 1.0.5!).  This is a bit of a 
stretch, but would coordinate with some port-mac68k booting work he 
is also doing.

>
>:)My own experience is that the machine was fine without System Disk
>:)and wouldn't boot properly after I ran it.
>
>Idunno, considering the number of models that are completely broken until
>System Disk patches them, I'd rather encourage use of it.  Then, if there
>are problems, they can just disable use-nvramrc?.  At least that way,
>System Disk figures out the screen device, sets up load-base, and has a
>non-threatening GUI.

That seems to be the consensus.  I just don't want you to think there 
aren't exceptions |-(


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h.b.hotz@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz@oxy.edu