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Hi Openbios hackers,
I am sorry for my long time of silence. I had to finnish a lot of work of which I thought it could be done much faster. I expect to be able to spend quite much time for OpenBIOS starting from next week.
I got a complete intel testing machine plus 2 motherboards for testing with OpenBIOS (one is an old SMP board). I got my old vt100 Terminal running now, too
Niklas Ekström wrote a little Program which is able so put a disk file into the shadowed ram from 0xe0000-0xfffff. This allows to test a bios without needing to flash it. I had no time to test it yet. Thanks, Niklas. I'll put it on the web page as soon as I finnished the last stuff here.
I'll finally try to move the OpenBIOS homepage and mailing list to openbios.org
We had some problems with our mail server here which caused a lot of "Too many hops" mails to be sent out and deliver some mails more than one time. I suspect it was some software update on our universities mail gateway, so I don't think it will happen again soon.
Last week I got mail from Richard Stallman asking whether we want to become an official GNU project. We should discuss whether to do so or not. Here's an excerpt from what he wrote:
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here's an explanation of what it means for a program to be GNU software. I would be very glad to have OpenBIOS as a GNU Program, if that's what the developers of OpenBIOS would like.
====================================================================== Calling a program GNU software means that its developers and the GNU project agree that "This program is part of the GNU project, released under the aegis of GNU"--and say so in the program.
This means we would normally put the program on ftp.gnu.org (although we could instead refer to the developer's choice of ftp site) and we would want to put pages about the program on the GNU web server.
It means that the developers would agree pay some attention to making the program work well with the rest of the GNU system--and conversely that the GNU project would encourage other GNU maintainers to pay some attention to making their programs fit in well with it.
Just what it means to make programs work well together is mainly a practical matter that depends on what the program does. But there are a few general principles. Certain parts of the GNU coding standards directly affect the consistency of the whole system. These include the standards for configuring and building a program, and the standards for command-line options. It is important to make all GNU programs follow these standards, where they are applicable.
A GNU program should not recommend use of any non-free program, and it should not refer the user to any non-free documentation. The need for free documentation is now a major focus of the GNU project; to show that we are serious about the need for free documentation, we must not contradict our position by recommending use of documentation that isn't free.
Occasionally there are issues of terminology which are important for the success of the GNU project as a whole. So we ask maintainers of GNU programs to follow them. For example, the documentation files and comments in the program should speak of Linux-based GNU systems or GNU/Linux systems, rather than calling the whole system "Linux", and should use the term "free software" rather than "open source".
Deciding that a program is GNU software does not necessarily require transferring copyright to the FSF; that is a separate issue. - ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Especially the documentation passage may be a problem for us. But anyways, I'd like the idea of having openbios an official gnu project - what do you think?
Best regards, Stefan
- -- Reincarnation: Life sucks, then you die. Then life sucks again.
On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
Last week I got mail from Richard Stallman asking whether we want to become an official GNU project. We should discuss whether to do so or not. Here's an excerpt from what he wrote:
<snip Stallman's email>
Especially the documentation passage may be a problem for us. But anyways, I'd like the idea of having openbios an official gnu project - what do you think?
I was actually going to ask the list if there is someone doing the documentation. Appears not, in which case I would like to offer a hand.
I have joined this list just recently, so I don't know what the pace of development is and how much is already done and what needs to be documented. Let's hear some input.
-- Pawel Czarny, author of BluePaint for OS/2 http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~pczarny
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Pawel (Paul) Czarny -
Stefan Reinauer