Early Macintosh Image LoadEr / News: Recent posts

EMILE source tree is now managed under GIT.

You can browse soute at :

http://git.gitorious.org/emile/mainline

You can access to EMILE sources with

git clone git://gitorious.org/emile/mainline.git emile

or

git clone http://git.gitorious.org/emile/mainline.git emile

EMILE 0.12 has been released.

It introduces multiboot and ext2 support.

I'd like to thank Eric Shattow for the donation of a Mac mystic:

Thank you Eric, this is a wonderful gift !

I'll be at Ottawa for the Linux Symposium for my (real) job between 26th of june and 1st of july.

If you want to offer me a (canadian) beer, I think it's the good place.

EMILE 0.11 is released.

This is a minor feature enhancement release.

It introduces:
- better SCSI management (wait unit is ready)
- allow to create a bootable CDROM

You can try http://vivierlaurent.free.fr/Debian_3.1_r0a_m68k_Bin-1-boot.img

if you want to see a video showing EMILE booting Linux on SE/30 follow this link: http://emile.sourceforge.net/
(or http://vivierlaurent.free.fr/EMILE_ON_SE30.MP4\)
Rescue disk has been tested on: LCII, Performa 450 (LCIII), LC475, Mac SE/30, Quadra 610, Quadra 800, Quadra 840... read more

My paper about the principles of bootloaders has been published in the french magazine "GNU/Linux Magazine France" #91, February 2007.

http://www.ed-diamond.com/produit.php?produit=460

MARGOT 1.0 has been released this morning at 8:45 ;-)
http://vivierlaurent.free.fr/Margot.JPG

I'm happy to announce EMILE, my bootloader for Macintosh m68k, is now able to create bootable CD-ROM.

I've juste created an install CD-ROM for sarge.

But as it contains Apple copyrighted materials (the AppleDriver), it cannot be distributed widely.
It's only a first step, I'm working on writing a "dummy" AppleDriver of my own (a real AppleDriver is not needed for Linux... I guess)
For the moment, EMILE must extract an AppleDriver from a MacOS bootable CDROM.... read more

I'm currently working to make booting EMILE under basiliskII.
This will help me to develop a bootable CDROM.

EMILE 0.10 is released.

New features:

- use zlib-1.2.3
- decode ELF format
- can read files from CDROM

To install Debian from Sarge CD-ROM, try :

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/emile/emile-cdboot-sarge-0.10.bin?download

After a quest of several monthes (during which I bought two non-working 840AV on eBay...), I found last week a working 840AV and, now, EMILE can boot Linux on it:

http://emile.sourceforge.net/SNAPSHOT/

"Since the Release Team published its Vancouver Proposal for future release requirements for the Debian ports, a port has to show at least a userbase of 50 users."

http://buildd.net/cgi/archvote.phtml

EMILE needs this. Please, support Debian.

Emile 0.9 is released.

New features:

kernel parameters can be edited during boot by user
uncompress kernel on-the-fly
GCC 3 compatibility
Add Mac Classic support (68000 based)
Add manpages (many thanks to Stephen R. Marenka)

Bug Fix:

RAMDISK is now allocated at top of memory (as kernel wants)

EMILE 0.8 is released.

This is a minor bug fix release.

- Multi-architecture support
- Preliminary PPC support
- No MMU support
- Preliminary pure 68000 support (need a patched gcc)
- correct 68040 MMU bug
- Add better memory initialisation in first level
- Add better quickdraw initialisation in second level
- Add some partition tools to add Apple_Driver (experimental)

It has been tested successfully on:... read more

I've added a nightly build for EMILE (2 A.M. CEST):

http://emile.sourceforge.net/SNAPSHOT/

I've added a new package: emile-netboot.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=102098&package_id=151360
It allows to boot kernel from the floppy and the root filesystem from NFS.
I explain in the HOWTO how to configure the boot server, and for instance, how to boot on the installer of debian.
http://emile.sourceforge.net/howto.html#netboot

Yesterday evening my disk crashed... I think it was a bad idea to use an USB2 160 GB disk with a powermac 7600 to boot linux on :-P

I loose a lot of files in this operation, hopefully mostly in the linux kernel source tree.

Now, I have switched to my iMac DV. But I have no floppy disk drive on it to create EMILE floppy.

If someone could offer me an USB external floppy disk drive, it could be nice... it's my birthday next week (the 27th) ;-)

EMILE 0.7 is released.

This release allows to load linux directly from your SCSI disk, without floppy or MacOS, in less than 5 seconds....

You need to follow howto:

http://emile.sourceforge.net/howto.html

and to download emile-tools for m68k:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/emile/emile-tools-0.7_m68k.tar.bz2?download

Have fun with the snowman !

Tonight, 3 A.M., for the first time, EMILE was loaded from SCSI disk by MacOS ROM and was able to load kernel from SCSI disk too. No more MacOS, no more floppy, no more wasted disk space, no more wasted boot time...

Tonight, for the first time, EMILE loads the linux kernel from my SCSI disk.
For the moment, EMILE is always loaded from floppy, but, maybe for Christmas, we'll have full SCSI loaded EMILE...

EMILE is now able to boot linux on mystic macintosh (a 57x motherboard in a Color Classic).
Use "emile-set-output /dev/fd0 --gestaltid 92" to modify the gestalt id of your mac (perhaps it is 99 ?)
See http://colourclassicfaq.com/mobo/mystic.shtml for more details.
This feature is at the moment only available from CVS.

To be able to boot from a disk with EMILE and to load ramdisk from another floppy, I'm writting the missing floppy driver for linux mac68k.
You can find a first release at:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=102098&package_id=128883&release_id=265323

This two floppy images allow to boot a linux kernel from the first one and to load a ramdisk image from the second one.
The goal of this package is to implement SWIM floppy driver in linux m68k 2.2.
This version of driver has got some synchronisation problems, doesn't manage errors and cannot write on disk.
You can find kernel patch in patches section:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/download.php?group_id=102098&atid=631078&file_id=110454&aid=1074901

EMILE 0.6 is released.

Allow to boot on system with corrupted PRAM or empty PRAM battery by setting at startup the 32bit mode in PRAM. This is needed if you remove MacOS from disk and you have no CDROM: there is no way to set this value in PRAM by booting on MacOS.

Try the new rescue disk:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/emile/emile-rescue-0.6.bin?download

EMILE 0.5 is released.

EMILE supports now Macintosh SE/30, fragmented memory for RBV macintosh and a new serial line console.

Try the new rescue disk:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/emile/emile-rescue-0.5.bin?download

I received yesterday my new, up-to-date, computer: a MacSE/30 (iMac 1988 ;-) )

First analysis of the problem reveals that SSW 6.0.3 doesn't support the function Gestalt() used by EMILE .

It's very funny: my Mac IIci has got a SSW 6.0.4 and all works fine !

In fact, all is explained in:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/Operating_System_Utilities/Gestalt_Manager.pdf

"Gestalt()" comes with 6.0.4 !