OpenFirmware vs. Early Startup Control

[Beakster]

Yo,

I've never used an A1 or Pegasos and I'm a little confused by this OpenFirmware people are talking about.  From what I understand your computer boots to some kind of text based screen mode with a prompt.  At the prompt you have to enter which device to boot from based on the device it is attaced to (abit like linux?).

This seems really crap to me compared to what was offered by KS3.x chips.  One of the things I love most about the classic Amiga is being able to hold down both mouse buttons and boot any volume.  Also being able to assign boot priorities to devices.

I have nearly gone insane working with PCs and trying to achieve the same thing:
* BIOS has horrible texted based screen mode.
* Can only boot from Primary Partition on Primary Device.
* Some crap about logical devices.
* When running multiple OSes boot menu system needs to be installed on a FAT parition.
* Most BIOS made before 1998 can't boot CD/Zip/LS120


Seeing as how the OpenFirmware is in a flashrom, are Hyperion going to program it with a new verion of the Early boot controls?  Does this mean we will loose the fantastic "Start with no Startup Sequence".  And will we be forced to look at horrible PC like text based screen modes on startup?

[downix]

First a correction:

Hyperion's OS will not run on a machine with OpenFirmware.  The
AmigaOne ships with another boot utility, called uBoot, which works
very similar to Linux's LILO program.

As for OpenFirmware itself, the Pegasos's OF is primarily there to
configure the system, same way that Autoconf was supposed to work.
This means that your hardware is already set up, no ugly PnP needed or
messy device configuration utilities.  The front-end shell is still
somewhat primitive, but it is more than possible that in the future
there will be some kind of graphical front-end.  But that is not a
high priority for the Pegasos team, as they are at present working
hard to get the Pegasos 2 out the door by September.

[Warface]

The Pegasos Openfirmware has it's own language (Forth) in which you can even write scripts if you like. (You can make it autoboot, or boot  different OSes when holding down a key, etc.)

Never the less, Openfirmware is text based (which is a butt ugly thing compared to what Amigas offered) but one can get used to it. Hope soon there will be more advanced, non text based bootmanagers.

There may be already other possibilities, my knowledge is quite limited though.

[downix]

I should point out that FORTH allows for GUI's as well.  It is
actually known that some OF GUI front-ends can and do exist.

I happen to like FORTH, so I've seen some of these in action, they're
tres cool!