Looking for information about Open Firmware

[juancarlosonetti]

I have been considering using an iBook without an operating system, exclusively in the Open Firmware shell. In principle, it has the only thing a computer should need: A command line interpreter, in this case FORTH. From there, and with skill and time, the possibilities are endless.

I have been looking for any piece of OF documentation for days, but have found nothing. The NetBSD wiki has a good explanation of it, but only in the context of booting an operating system and little more.

Do you know of the existence of any documentation? Do you know the name of the FORTH interpreter included in the ROM? And also, do you know if there is a way to access a hard drive partition from OF, for example to save and read files?

 

[DearthnVader]

I have been considering using an iBook without an operating system, exclusively in the Open Firmware shell. In principle, it has the only thing a computer should need: A command line interpreter, in this case FORTH. From there, and with skill and time, the possibilities are endless.

I have been looking for any piece of OF documentation for days, but have found nothing. The NetBSD wiki has a good explanation of it, but only in the context of booting an operating system and little more.

Do you know of the existence of any documentation? Do you know the name of the FORTH interpreter included in the ROM? And also, do you know if there is a way to access a hard drive partition from OF, for example to save and read files?

OF is OF is OF, you may have luck asking questions at the openbios or SLOF mailing lists.

Apple's implementation of Open Firmware is mostly IEEE1275 compliant, the it can read HFS/HFS+ disks, I'm not sure it can write to them. Late 2005 Mac's can read fat32 partitions as well, maybe older Mac's can too, I've not tested.

However, I don't think OF has any builtin editor.

Years ago, someone wrote a Pong game in forth that ran on open firmware. Mostly you just want to learn to program in forth:

3. The Editor (and Staff)

Up till now you've been compiling new definitions into the dictionary by typing them at your terminal. This chapter introduces an alternate method, using

www.forth.com

 

[mmphosis]

Boot into open Firmware - when powering on, hold down four keys: Command Option O F

You should see a welcome message, and a Forth prompt:

0 > _

words

words should list all of the available words in Forth.

I think at one time I was able to telnet to Open Firmware from another computer:

Debugging Open Firmware Using Telnet