At 16:27 -0700 1998-06-08, Kevin Ogden wrote:
>Ok, it says to have the OpenFirmware console come up you need an external
>terminal and hit command-option-o-f.
>Will it come up if you don't have an external terminal?

Desktop machines use 'ttya' (serial port 1(I forget which one that is)) as
the {input,output}-device by default[1] (seems like it'd be more sensible
to look for a keyboard to decide what input/output device to default to,
but this is Apple we're talking about ;), except on PowerBooks, where the
screen/keyboard are the output/input devices by default.

>Is Apple OpenFirmware read/write like Alpha SRM ROMs?  If it is,
>theoretically you could develop a patch to patch the ROMs to allow booting
>of BSD from OpenFirmware instead of a MacOS boot extension/app.

That isn't necessary, Apple OF works fine as a boot-loader (as long as it
is handed a COFF binary), but not much else.

[1] This can be changed, but many "Apple BrokenFirmware(tm)" :) screen
drivers are extremely flaky.
--
Joel "Espy" Klecker
Debian GNU/Linux Developer
<mailto:jk@espy.org>
<http://web.espy.org/>