On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, John Summerfield wrote:
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
> > First, the easy thing [skip this paragraph if you could care less
> > about Debian policies]. Debian has set itself a policy to seperate
> > entirely free software packages (`main') from free software packages
> > which need a non-free component to run (`contrib', arguable a bad
> > name) and non-free software packages (`non-free'). Only the first
> > group is a proper part of the
>
>
> Weird.
>
> Linux (the kernel) is GPL. Right?
>
> on Intel, it absolutely requires a BIOS to boot. Right?
>
> BIOSes are non-free. Right?
>
> Does Debian put kernel in contrib?
Hm... does the Linux kernel actually need the PC BIOS? I was under
the impression that LILO got the kernel into mem (with the help of the
BIOS), set the CPU to protected mode, set the program counter to the first
byte of the kernel and then backed away so the Linux to do it's job.
I was under the impression that from there the Linux kernel didn't do
anything with the PC BIOS and instead did all the legwork for supporting
hardware on it's own.
perl -e 'for$a(2..999){$t=1;for(@S){$t*=$a%$_}if($t){@S=(@S,$a);print"$a\t"}}'
Bart Grantham - Geek/Musician at large - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
perl -e 'for(1..99999){print" "x(38+sin($_*.2)*38),"#####\n";for(1..9999){}}'
