[OLPC-devel] Re: patch: add sda devs to buildrom skeleton

[Ronald G Minnich]

Any UI presented by a BIOS to the user should be both simple and capable.

Simple: less to go wrong.

capable: just try to figure out what to do when the kbl with 2 options 
fails. Now what? But if you have ash+busybox, you do have a chance at 
least to dig yourself out of a hole.

Our 6 years of experience with embedding an OS in flash tell us that a 
linux kernel in there is good, and a simple shell prompt, with zero 
glitz, and enough commands to get work done, is really the way to go. A 
pre-packaged program (like kbl) is going to let you down sooner or later.

I've been running linuxbios ONLY on my OLPC for about a month, and 
everything I've learned so far only strengthens my opinions on this 
score. It's very, very helpful to have mkdir, mknod, cat, ls, etc. there 
for the times when things just aren't working.

thanks

ron