Using 3rd Party Commercial/Free BIOS With XO Laptops

[Bernardo Innocenti]

big one wrote:

> Because XO Laptops are sold to the public using "Buy 2 Get 1", IMO there should be a
> warning to buyer that the machine does not have standard BIOS and cannot run
> unmodified Linux, BSD, Haiku or other Operating System.

Why do you feel anyone could mistakenly get this impression?  Other hand-held or mobile
devices on the market don't need to say "this is not 100% PC-AT compatible".
At least, our hardware could be made to work with these systems some day.

The XO comes as an appliance with its own custom OS, which happens to be a variant
of Fedora 7 plus a nice UI.  You're free to hack it as you would do with an N800 or
an iPod, but with the additional advantage of good documentation and a vibrant
community of free-software developers to help you.

The fact that the XO has an x86 CPU makes porting OSes and applications easier,
but was never meant to make it yet another PC clone.  There are more than enough
of these already.


> Can the consumer buy additional commercial BIOS from 3rd party or use Free BIOS for
> OLPC to enable support for standard Linux, BSD, Haiku etc?

This is certainly possible, and it may even be easy, but it's unsupported by OLPC.
The A-test boards used to ship with an Insyde x86 BIOS that would also boot DOS.
Then we switched to LinuxBIOS which, I guess, should also be able to run DOS.


> Can the customer buy the XO laptops with 3rd party BIOS already installed on
> the hardware, because flashing BIOS is a dangerous operation for newbie users?

In theory, a BIOS could be loaded and run from a filesystem.  Either the NAND
flash or external devices. 


> What kind of BIOS compatible with OLPC, is it Phoenix / Award, American
> Megatrend, Unified Extensible Firmware (UEFI), GNUFI, U-Boot, OpenBIOS
> or other BIOS?

A very compatible, freely distributable, BIOS implementation is also bundled
with QEMU and it could be made to work on the XO.  The Insyde BIOS may also
still work, I don't know (or care).


Ah, and just in case: the opinions hereby expressed are mine and don't,
necessarily represent anybody's official position... etc. etc.

-- 
 \___/
 |___|  Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \___\ One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/