Olegil wrote,
@Floid:
The official firmware for the Teron is UBoot, which Hyperion wrote. They included RDB support (I'm booting Linux from a boot partition in an RDB right here), and thus all Terons got this ability. It's not like each and every reseller of Teron boards has to write their own firmware...
Agreed/understood. But with everyone so x86-centric and the RDB fdisk just now coming out from under the radar (where did I see you complaining about trying to convince Debian to allow/host/sponsor/acknowledge a RDB-centric install image?), one wonders if resellers smart enough to poke at the firmware might remove the option to avoid confusing people (while, say, putting in a splash screen to 'productize' it or something). That point is, of course, moot until they find a second company interested in selling the designs as 'something elses' instead of 'Terons.' ... since 'Teron' sort of implies whatever configuration Mai wants to impose on their brand. In the same sense as buying a Gigabyte board implies such-and-such BIOS as is meant to ship with that model, while the same thing sold as a Gateway is going to have a splash screen, maybe some customization in the configuration menu or options hardcoded out, maybe some of the 'recovery partition' - or now, 'EULA partition' :-o "added value" that Wintel OEMs like to slip in...
Serious question - who's holding the current sources to fulfill the GPL end of the bargain? I flipped through the Sourceforge CVS to remember which Frieden I was badgering ;-), and didn't see anything marked "-XE," but then, that might not have been necessary given the similarities, and there were semi-recent commits. Is Sourceforge current with what's shipping on the boards, and if not, who's door would the next party in line have to knock on to get them, MAI's or Eyetech's? I can imagine a firm with no interest in "Amiga" patches not bothering to buy a board from Eyetech to entitle them to the absolute current sources. (Not that I think obfuscation is anyone's intention, but... at least from what I remember around the Terrasoft time, 'best practices' for this hardware/firmware combo might not be as clear as Mai or any Amigan wants to think.)
The dongle code is another matter. That isn't part of UBoot, it's just code placed in the same flashrom by an external program...
Yep. And the obvious 'political' reason/answer...
I actually believe that someone who buys a Teron to run Linux on it would do himself a favour by looking into using RDB instead of MBR.
[...]
Agreed. I was hoping Terrasoft was going to roll with their Boxers, use the RDB code (since their Mac customers are used to more flexibility than the Wintel scheme, and if I remember right, the RDB is actually simpler and more flexible than whatever Apple's been using), and get at least one Amiga-originated spec discussed among 'real-world' techies again. Free advertising and all that.
But people do silly things.
(remember that they would have to use the amigaone linux kernel as well )
Okay, editing this after I bothered to read things... Good to hear there's cooperation between "sides" happening, but does that mean there's no Grand Unified PowerPC Kernel happening? ...and if so, is that off the radar entirely, or just something that hasn't been worked towards yet? It'd be a little bloaty, I'm sure, but it'd be nice to have one .ISO that works on both platforms. (Then again, I'm not down with the Debian install procedure, and haven't tried in four years... You guys don't copy your kernel off the bootfloppy set, do you?)
Hope you're feeling better, by the way... Sorry to make you slog through this if you're not!
