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."

Comments

Jumping to conclutions is human nature

[anss123]

It saves time, and is often correct.

What are the facts of the case?

[erroneus]

This guy's rebuttal doesn't do anything to address the facts save a call to a Phoenix BIOS person who says "we didn't and don't do that."

But what of the purported fact that the guy cannot get another OS on there? An effective rebuttal would include a good explanation why this problem occured; even better if it discussed a work-around or a fix.

Phoenix can claim they aren't [intentionally] doing this, but is it really happening in effect whether intentional or not? If it is, what is their response? If it isn't, who is this guy making this claim and what is he doing wrong?

Does anyone here have such a laptop? Would you care to install Linux on it as a test? Has anyone here tried? Did it work?

What are the facts? Can any of this be confirmed?

Re:What are the facts of the case?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the same poster as above (somewhere), but I do have an HP dv9000z
with a Phoenix BIOS.

There is no capability in the BIOS to boot off of the second hard drive;
fortunately GRUB on openSuSE 10.2 knows how to scribble itself in to the
MBR on the primary drive, and permit me to boot either Linux or Windows.

However, even despite setting the appropriate items in the BIOS, I'm having
a VERY difficult time booting off of an external USB(2.0) Western Digital "Book"
drive. I can get to a GRUB> prompt, but it won't automatically boot what's
been set up in the /boot directory of the first partition of the drive. Why?
The Phoenix crap CLAIMS it can boot off of a USB Drive, but I have very grave
suspicions, at the very least, that perhaps it can't for some nefarious reason.

Those are my personal observations, and I'm entitled to them. If Phoenix can
explain their way out of it, so be it. I'm sure HP will do their little dance
that basically says "Windows or nothing" as usual, since the spineless cowards
in Houston they inherited from Compaq absolutely hate any non-Windows OS, since
they're totally incapable of trying to understand them.

Re:What are the facts of the case?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that every BIOS in existance takes a checksum of the CMOS contents. In fact, some most motherboards reset the CMOS contents by simply wiping the contents of the CMOS checksum, causing the BIOS to detect the CMOS is corrupted on boot and then reset the contents with defaults.

There's absolutely no way a bug could possibly set the BIOS password. The GP poster is a complete idiot.

Re:Hmm..

[mikeisme77]

Eh, I think if this had been posted to Slashdot then the users (not all of them, of course, but enough) would have called it out. I mean, it's an article from 2003 so it's pretty easy to prove false.

On a side note, I think a lot of Slashdotters go to both Digg and Slashdot (I do). The difference is though that I use Slashdot for the summary and discussion (article if it's interesting enough), whereas the summary and discussion on Digg tend to be pretty crappy, but some times I can find a link to an interesting article--although most of the time lately it's been to a blog entry and then I have to click through a few layers to get to the actual article... BTW, there's a special place in hell for people who post about news stories without providing a link to the news story.

Re:Spazamataz?

[Ant P.]

Just for fun, try this command as root:
strings /proc/acpi/dsdt | grep Microsoft