On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 06:12:46PM -0800, Willow Schlanger wrote:
> But the BIOS does something important: it configures all of the chipsets
> on the motherboard to their default settings, and typically those
> settings get adjusted to make things run as fast as possible provided
> there are no problems.
Yah, and that's why you can't use a normal /system/ BIOS with plex86. (I've
tried.) It tries to init a chipset that isn't there.
> Linux to boot. Some major motherboard manufacturers are helping that
> team out by sending them sample motherboards to test on, and pseudocode.
> They'd probably prefer not to need to license any special BIOS and in
Yah. All mobo people (except IBM)(IIRC) licence a BIOS from AMI or Award...
and they've merged, so now have an effective monopoly.
> I think there's another free BIOS project that motherboard and chipset
> companies are contributing too; it's a full BIOS project, however, and
> as it is done by hobbiests, there's the chance that reverse engineering
> might be done. I wonder, is it legal to reverse engineer your BIOS and
> then make a competing BIOS?
Yes. That's exactly what the clone makers did to make IBM compatable
BIOSes. However, you have to be careful when doing that. Disassembeling
the BIOS, and then writing another BIOS that shares no code is legal. Copy
a couple of instructions, and not any more.
-=- James Mastros
--
90% of yiddish means "dick". You have to look past that to /what/ meaning
of "dick" it has.
AIM: theorbtwo homepage: http://www.rtweb.net/theorb/
