Slashdot Mirror
Jumping to Conclusions on BIOS, Phoenix, and Windows
tomlasusa writes "In a post on LinuxQuestions.org, user 'chessonly' cites a 2003 article from Networkcomputing.com by writer Steven J. Schuchart as evidence of that Phoenix Technologies has made its BIOS more Windows-friendly — thereby locking out users from using other OSs. In a rebuttal posted at nwc.com, Schuchart says that this is just not true."
At the risk of being modded troll...
The article basically says "a post made by a clueless chap on a forum is almost certainly conplete twaddle. I wouldn't have even written this but his post quotes me."
So, IOW: the article is one big "nothing happened"
How is this news?
From what I can tell, there's a bug with the user's laptop and some "USB-to-serial thing" according to his forum post. Whatever it did, it managed to get the BIOS to set a password. The user decides this is because they installed Linux, and the BIOS is "only for Windows Vista" and therefore locks out non-Windows OSes.
He then links to another post as "proof" which you'll not never mentions any non-Windows OS. My guess is that it's the "USB-to-serial thing" that's causing some bug in the BIOS that corrupts parts of the CMOS, causing a password to be set. (As an added bonus, if it's truly random data, it could be an untypable password.)
So, nothing to do with running Linux, and everything to do with the "USB-to-serial" thing that the user used. At least, that's my guess.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
What actually happens is when a piece of PC hardware is changed/created, the hardware manufacturer writes only windows drivers for it that mostly follow the specs, but also contain various workarounds for the bugs/mistakes that they introduced. It's then in MS's favour to then still allow that hardware to be classed as 'ready for Vista' despite not adhering to the various open standards/specs, since it will make Linux's work more trouble.
And yeah Microsoft does have various conspiracies against linux. See the recent news on Bill Gates asking how to make an open ACPI spec that would be difficult for linux to implement.
And we care why?
One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific
0 11607/3000/PX03020.pdf
It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the results is that Linux works great without having to do the work
Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.
Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.
Or maybe we could patent something related to this.
http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/
davecb5620@gmail.com
I have a Toshiba Satellite U205 which has been happily running Ubuntu Linux since about 4 hours after I bought it in December 2006. The install, as is typical of Ubuntu, was completely trouble-free and required no intelligence at all (I did manually partition it first so as to leave the OEM XP system intact). Suspend to RAM doesn't work (not a surprise), and I've never taken the time to get the fingerprint reader working, but everything else is fine. And toshset works, for the most part. On the other hand, I've never tried to get the BIOS functions on the Fn keys working. I should add that my work desktop and the server I'm one of the admins for both run FreeBSD, so Linux isn't exactly my life.
the laptop powers off after hibernation, it is not a sleep or something like that.
Since i installed grub i can actually choose to load another OS(ubuntu)in the same drive and boot it. What just annoys me is i can't boot a usb pen or a cd.
As far the windows partitions i can read files as long i don't do any alterations to that partition, since it is in a inconsistent state.
The weird is that i looked at others laptops(non Toshiba) and they don't have this behavior.