-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Linuxbios and Linspire laptop Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 10:10:43 -0500 From: Bari Ari bari@onelabs.com To: Jan Macek miernik@ctnet.pl CC: Richard Stallman rms@gnu.org References: E1BSJLs-0005OB-ON@fencepost.gnu.org 40B25E08.8030401@onelabs.com 20040601140614.GA945@jaworz.ctnet.pl
Jan Macek wrote:
What about the Linspire Mobile PC laptop? Is there really anything missing to got something working at all (proprietary-BIOS-free)? Let's say we don't care about power management, lid etc. We just want to be able to use GNU operating system without booting aby proprietary firmware. Is there anything _essenstial_ missing now, the board was said to be the same as VIA EPIA.
If it's the same as a supported Epia then the port is well on its way. Can you find out what they use for the keyboard controller?
You may have to care about power management, SystemBIOS reflashing and the lid etc. or those features may not work depending on how they did the hardware design. Like I have said before there is really no standard for this. Hardware guys like myself typically use whatever I/O pins are left over to solve these issues and then make it work with firmware attached to the keyboard BIOS.
I'd really like to pick a laptop with a chipset with plenty of life left like the new Intel 9xx series due out very shortly.
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/05/31/2211233.shtml?tid=137&tid=152&...
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=2064&p=5
Send us an Intel chipset laptop with a Renesas super I/O and we have a winner!
I set up a page with some information about LinuxBIOS, and links to some of your posts. Please take a look if I got it right and what might I add: http://www.miernik.ctnet.pl/linuxbios/
Looks good so far!
Regards,
Bari Ari