Hi Robert, On 19.03.2009 19:58, Robert Vogel wrote: > Hi Carl-Daniel, > > I'm just looking for a simple desktop solution that has as few > 'closed' components as possible. > Enough so that it can be more trustworthy. > > Last year I wrote the related page, so it isn't up to date. Correct me > on the points that bother you though > and I'll fix it.
Sorry, no offense intended. Here is the (incomplete) list of errors in the BIOS section. > I am not aware of single motherboard manufacturer that offers an open > source BIOS. Tyan offers boards with coreboot. Silicon Mechanics offers boards with coreboot (though not necessarily boards manufactured by them). > The most likely vendors (Tyan and Giga) have no interest in allowing a > substitute BIOS. See above. > The Free Software Foundation is working on it No. > It is not practical, right now, for a personal computer. Works for quite a few boards in the consumer range. > The Free Software Foundation has listed motherboards > <http://linuxbios.org/index.php/Supported_Motherboards> [11] No, it's the coreboot project/group. The FSF has nothing to do with it. > It has two Free & Open Source BIOS: One, thanks to AMD engineer > Yinghai Lu who released GPL-licensed code, and the other is from > *LinuxBIOS*, a Free Software project. Really? Yinghai contributed his code to coreboot. Only one implementation. > The modifications and determination of payload are, I think, challenging. It depends on what you want. SeaBIOS is pretty much what everyone wants nowadays. > The FSF page makes this quite clear. coreboot, not FSF. > It comes in about 4 different forms, one with SPI. No. Two with SPI. > LinuxBIOS runs on many embedded boards, for example the [...] OLPC > "XO" laptop ([6] laptop.org) . No longer on the OLPC. > My question remains, which 64-bit, coreboot board would be best for a > fully functional desktop ? The Asus M2V-MX SE. It even works without a video BIOS, giving you probably the most free solution with integrated graphics and 64bit. > Would you expect trouble with it ? No board is completely tested. There will always be some corner case that is untested and/or not working yet. That even applies to proprietary BIOS. If you have no way to recover from a bad flash, you should not reflash or update any BIOS, regardless of whether it is open source or not. Regards, Carl-Daniel P.S. RMS thinks a closed source BIOS is OK as long as it is stored in a real non-reflashable ROM because it is no longer software but hardware. -- http://www.hailfinger.org/ -- coreboot mailing list: [email protected] http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
