I think the nice thing about linuxbios is the flexibility it provides.  You're not limited by what the mainboard manufacturer gives you and can be more creative. With a video chip, you can have accelerated video 2 seconds after the system boots like, say, the xbox.  This is on a regular off-the-shelf motherboard. I've been working for the past few weeks on my epia M 10000 motherboard to do some nice things with the video subsystem in the BIOS. It's been great so far and the folks on the message board have done a fantastic job answering questions.  I couldn't have gotten anywhere with a closed source BIOS.