Aren't the bios chips soldered down on some of these boards? I
was wondering
what alternatives you have, short of unsoldering the chip and finding a programmer, if something goes wrong in the flashing process or
the linuxbios
code has a bug.
you really should not buy a board with a bios soldered down ... there are very few of them because failed bios flashes in essence destroy a board.
ron
A number of the Giga-byte boards seem to have the bios soldered, in particular the the GA-6VEML (the Walmart $199 computer). The Via Eden appears to also but I am just looking at the photo. For the EPIA, if you bongo the PLCC (socketed), you'll need another PLCC bios mobo to fix it and hot swapping a PLCC has got to require a deft touch. Personally I prefer to use my Needham's programmer and I have never flashed on the mobo. In the case of the GA-6VEML, I intend to install an SM socket (PLCC) if I ever get to putting linuxbios on that one. But anyone considering linuxbios that does not have a programmer should think of their backup plan if there is a bug or flashing failure.
The main point of my question, though, was if anyone was aware of another way to program the flash short of unsoldering it. I wasn't aware of any, and maybe it seemed like a silly question, but if the mobo mfrs would start using the LPC interface flash, and put a header on the mobo to access it, you could program it from a PC-LPT interface with a specially wired cable (plus a few R's and D's). This has been done on the Xbox and the software is available on the net. The LPC flash would also allow much larger memory in the same footprint, which is really useful. The success of this can depend somewhat on how the other chips behave, though, while programming (mobo power is off).
-Steve