...

Finally, EMILE, the Early Mac Image LoadEr, is part of Debian. It had been in the works for quite a while; First Stephen Marenka filed an ITP for the thing a bit over a year ago; and then I did the same, not noticing Stephen had the ITP out for a few weeks already when I did so.

ITP bugs were merged, we set up an SVN repository, and then nothing happened for a long time, mainly because while I could get it to build, I did not succeed in actually booting a kernel off my own-built emile. In the mean time, another version was released—one with wonderful features, such as an ELF loader and gunzip implementation (so that I could ditch the script that I'd written to throw kernels through objdump), the ability to boot off of CD-ROM drives (would be great for d-i), and more.

Finally, about a month and a half ago, I got the thing to actually boot on barok, my IIci, when I compiled it myself. And there was much rejoicing.

It's spent the last month in NEW, but now Joerg and/or Jeroen are back, so it's been ACCEPTed. Whee!

If you're interested in giving emile a try on your m68k machine, then feel free (once you can, after the next mirror pulse), but beware: EMILE does not have the ability to install more than one kernel yet, and you can't boot from EMILE to MacOS yet, either, should you make a mistake. I recommend trying it out on a floppy disk first, or to use a second hard disk which you can place as the second disk in your system, should it be required.

In other, only slightly related, news, there's a new release for belpic about to come out, too. But more on that later.