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From ilug-admin@linux.ie  Tue Aug  6 13:58:22 2002

At 13:30 06/08/2002, John P. Looney wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 01:22:07PM +0100, Anders Holm mentioned:
> > > Heh, how hard would it be to get a PC with an OpenBoot prom ?
> >
> > You could burn a PROM yourself, if you'd wish. I believe that the netboot
> > project would have a PROM you could download and burn, having the needed
> > h/w of course.. ;)
>
>  But the PROMs are for specific network cards, and all their are really is
>a bootp/tftp client. Not the whole set of nice bits & pieces you get with
>an OpenBoot PROM.
True, but would still enable you to do a network install without using boot
floppies. Then again, boot floppies are cheaper, and easier to recreate
when you'd like to do some changes to it. Gets messier when you'd have a
boot image on a server, and the only way you can test it is to boot it over
the network. In any case, it's just one option available.
>  AMD were talking of supporting it ages back, when the Athlon was looking
>like it would just be on workstations from day one. They seemed to drop
>it, and go for the crappy MSDOS compatible BIOS though.
Too bad they didn't go with that then. Would have been so much nicer than
the old MSDOS crap. I do like the OpenBoot idea actually. Especially being
able to set the PROM to boot from whatever disk slice you'd want. No need
to set that in lilo/grub any more in that case, since the OpenBoot rom
takes care of that part for you. Then again, you wouldn't get a menu that
allows you to choose what you want to boot. There's good and bad, all
depending on what you want to do, I suppose. Sitting here and typing I'm
realising that it is both a nice thing, and a nasty thing..
Ah well, life sucks as well, some say.. ;)
//Anders//
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