LinuxPPC, Inc., (or .com) is a distribution, with R5 in beta from LPPC, Inc.,
and it would seem that it heavily favors PowerMac owners (and thus, BootX
would be its official method of booting), since the largest number of PPC
platform owners are PowerMac users, or at least have PowerMacs on which they
run LinuxPPC. There are other distributions, but on the .org site they are not
given much attention (which naturally means that Quik and/or OF would be
pushed to the side as time goes on).
I think that this list also heavily favors LPPC, Inc., because at the moment
it is the largest distribution, and really, the best supported. So when you
see that R5 is going to support only BootX, remember that it is only this
particular distribution that will do that. Certainly you are free to create
your own distribution based on others' work, with whatever modifications you
think are desirable. Or if you can get a number of people to work on that
project, more power to you and your distribution.
As for me, I will soon be back to hacking my way through OF, figuring it all
out, and letting the world know what I discover, and hopefully making a useful
contribution to the LinuxPPC.org movement.
Russell Hires
Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> As someone from LinuxPPC Inc. said in a post to linuxppc-user, LinuxPPC
> will always work with Open Firmware. However, BootX will be the oficial
> and suppoted method of booting.
>
> I just realized in a state of shock why kernels from 2.1.127 have not been
> working for me: I have been doing it the "old way" (quik). All recent
> kernels fail to boot becuase they can not read the mac partition map. Of
> course, I have mac partition map support compiled in. I finally realized
> that this all works fine when booting from BootX. AARRGGG!!! Not only is
> this a problem for people who prefer to use quik, but it is a _MAJOR_
> problem for people who have machines that don't run MacOS, such as PReP
> and CHRP. (Perhaps these kernels work fine on non-pmac machines with Open
> Firmware, I don't have the resources to find out.)
>
> So, currently Linux doesn't even work without BootX? I thought that
> "future versions of LinuxPPC would work with Open Firmware...".
>
> I would consider the partition map problem a bug, so it might as well be
> reported...
>
> Now my choice is between 2.1.125, 2.1.24, and MacOS, until/if Linux
> ever works again from Open Firware rather than MacOS...
>
> I also saw a patch today which added credit to the author of BootX among
> many other things? Uhhh.... since when is BootX part of the kernel? I
> could go out and write a crappy bootloader for X86 and not get credited
> for it. Are the authors of BootMagic, System Commader, quik, and NT's
> Bootloader credited for their work just because their bootloader happens
> to be able to load linux? The point is that people can use whatever
> compatible bootloader they want to load Linux, and these bootloaders are
> not a part of Linux, therefore people should not be given credit for
> writting bootloaders in the Linux credits. The appropriate place for
> credits on a bootloader would be in the bootloader's credits file!
> (Imagine that Microsoft gave credits in its credits screens to every
> single company that made a PC capable of running Windows....)
>
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