--- James Simmons <jsimmons@infradead.org> wrote:

--- Brandon W. Howard <brandon_waldgrave@yahoo.com> wrote:

...

Hi,

The GIGABYTE M57SLI-S4 [1] is the first-ever desktop motherboard supported by a Free & Open Source BIOS, thanks to AMD engineer Yinghai Lu who released GPL-licensed code last month. This state-of-the-art motherboard is based on the NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI chipset and AMD's latest Socket AM2. It contains tons of advanced features such as:

Support for AMD Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 processors 2X PCI Express x16 slots 3X PCI Express x1 slots 2X PCI slots 3X 1394a (FireWire) ports 10X USB 2.0 16GB maximum memory SATA RAID 6X SATA 3Gb/s slots.

This motherboard can be obtained today from many retail and online stores [2] and the source code for the BIOS can be downloaded from the LinuxBIOS SVN server [3].

This is a huge victory in the quest for a completely Free & Open Source general-purpose computer that enables users to have full control over their own hardware. The Free Software Foundation has made the campaign for a Free BIOS a top priority because it is a key component in the software stack of personal computers [4]. The need for a Free BIOS is even more pressing since DRM and Treacherous Computing have found their way into some proprietary BIOSes and EFI. From a practical perspective, LinuxBIOS removes the need for ugly hacks and workarounds in the kernel that compensate for buggy BIOSes – we can now fix the BIOS ourselves.

I encourage everyone upgrading their desktop computers to consider getting this motherboard or another one that is supported by LinuxBIOS.

-Brandon [1]

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?Produ...

...

[2] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813128014

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[3] http://linuxbios.org/Download_LinuxBIOS [4] http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html

Quick question. Can this board initialize more than one graphics card?

The motherboard has plenty of expansion slots and is SLI-enabled, so the hardware should support multiple graphics cards. I personally haven’t tried this, but perhaps someone on the LinuxBIOS mailinglist (CC’ed) has had experience with such a setup. BTW: An OpenGraphics card (http://OpenGraphics.org , http://TraversalTech.com) will be released pretty soon that will be fully documented and that will come with an open-source VGA video BIOS. -Brandon ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for earth-friendly autos? Browse Top Cars by "Green Rating" at Yahoo! Autos' Green Center. http://autos.yahoo.com/green_center/ ____________________________________________________________________________________ 8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time with the Yahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#news