Robinson Tryon wrote:
On 9/18/07, Uwe Hermann uwe@hermann-uwe.de wrote:
Correct. No laptop whatsoever (except for the OLPC) is supported by LinuxBIOS at the moment. We definately like to change that, but at the moment there's no support at all. ... ... The last chipset which was added was the Intel 810. Supporting new chipsets is a _major_ piece of work, so don't expect this to happen every week or so...
So Intel doesn't want to open up the specs on their hardware, whereas AMD is willing to play ball (at least to some extent) ?
Would writing to Intel (if only to be counted as one more data point) help at all?
I thought that Intel had a pretty good track record with the FOSS community, what with their wireless cards and integrated graphics cards having nice, open drivers... but perhaps it was all about the money and they didn't actually care about maintaining a relationship with the community at all...
Intel's datasheets are available freely online. I don't know if there's more info that they send to Award, etc, but the i440bx, i810, and now i830 ports were all written from those. It's the embedded controllers, which may/may not be Intel's design, that are the biggest discouragement for most people considering laptop ports.
-Corey