Some newbie questions

[kok]

Hi Ron et al,   I would like to adapt linuxbios to some motherboard, as an exercise to learn some of the nitty-gritties of PC hardware and Linux.  I have done some embedded systems development with 8748 and H8/300 processors, and have used Linux extensively for C program development at the user level, but until now haven't gotten very far into the internals of Linux or PC hardware. I have a few questions to start with:   1.  Does anyone have the information I would need to make a BIOS for an old no-name '486 motherboard I have that uses a SiS 85C460ATQ (glue chip, I assume), HM6818A (next to 27512 AMIBIOS (c) 1992 EPROM, would the 6818 be the CMOS RAM and/or clock?), and a P8042AHP marked American Megatrends L2450524 (this seems to be a peripheral controller with ROM, but what does it control?).   2.  If it's going to be difficult to get linuxbios working on the above motherboard, I could buy another motherboard.  How difficult would it be to get a FIC PA2013 (K6 processor, Via Apollo MVP3 chipset, flash BIOS ROM) to work?  This MB is on sale at tigerdirect.com for $60 including K6-2 450MHz processor, and I like it because it supports ECC memory (but I haven't been able to make USB cameras work with this MB).  Other MBs that I like are Gigabyte GA-7IXE4 (Athlon, AMD 751, AMD 756, Winbond 83977, 2M bit FLASH), FIC AD-11 (Athlon) and Gigabyte GA-7DX (Athlon).  Does the issue you have with AMD affect these MBs?   3.  Does anyone know of a program that can operate a HILO ALL-02 universal programmer under Linux, so I don't have to switch from Linux to Windoze to program my EPROMS?   Thanks for any help you can give on these questions! - Jan Kok