Off you go… into the purple yonder!

I purchased a Soekris 4801-60 with a LAN1641 plugin board for my parents’ home, to replace a Debian-based internet gateway on an old pc that I set up way back in 1999.
The idea was to replace the old, coax-based network with a UTP network, and use the Soekris as internet gateway/switch. Its seven ports suffice [...]

I’ve written up a LinuxBIOS build tutorial for the Gigabyte m57sli-s4.
This tutorial still works off Yinghai Lu’s big MCP55 patch, but a patch from Ed Swierk hit the list today which resolves the last issues for building the m57sli code (if you disable the USB debug code). I’ve tested it - it works fine - [...]

Went to see MaxedOut tonight in a special showing at Harvard Law. Highly recommended - catch it if you can. It’s also very timely now that (subprime) debt is “suddenly” a big issue because a couple of big lenders are in financial trouble. As the film shows, credit card companies and major banks are doing [...]

I finally managed to get the Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 to boot LinuxBIOS today. Turns out that some kernel boot parameters were required to make it do the right thing with the IRQs.
It’s not perfect yet: the network interface doesn’t work, there’s no ACPI support, the USB debug device support needs to be disabled (probing for the [...]

Justin and I have written a paper on this topic titled
The road to hardware free from restrictions: how hardware vendors can help the free software community
The paper was published today on the Free Software Foundation website.