Peter Lister wrote:
Yes, but presumably a supplier who might handle a reasonable number of units is likelier to get a hearing from the upstream vendor than the average end user, especially if there is no intervening retail vendor who understands nothing but M$.
Just out of interest, my laptop is a Clevo SiS unbranded, no Windows job. Winmodem doesn't work, as one might expect, and the sound card needs Linux ACPI support turned on, but other than that it's fine.
Oh, and the VGA text mode is badly aligned when the framebuffer is working. But that's liveable with. Nothing else wrong, though.
lspci attached. What are the chances??
The SiS 650 chipset was never supported by LinuxBIOS. SiS also dropped interest in LinuxBIOS last year.
A laptop that uses any of the currently supported chipsets or any chipsets by Intel or AMD won't be a problem (since they openly post docs for their chipsets) to support under LinuxBIOS except for the issues with the keyboard scan micros that are also used for power management, battery charging, BIOS Flashing etc. Laptops typically use I/O on these micros to control writes to the flash. You may need to know the "magic code" or at least the register locations in the micro to turn on BIOS Flash write enables.
We did some work before on creating open firmware for these devices.
Some examples of cpu based super i/o's:
http://www.renesas.com/eng/products/mpumcu/16bit/h8s/2100/index.html
Some descriptions of the closed source firmware and how they use these micros:
http://www.insydesw.com/solutions/pc/keyboard.htm
http://www.phoenix.com/en/products/phoenix+cme+firstbios/system+firmware/tec...
-Bari