Yesterday Luc Verhaegen gave a talk at FOSDEM on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS, but today we finally have X@FOSDEM for the last time.

Motherboard manufacturers usually bundle proprietary software with their products that allow monitoring of hardware sensors, flashing of the motherboard BIOS, and overclocking all from within the Windows operating system. With the exception of LM_Sensors providing some sensors support, this is a grey area for Linux.

"You can help our campaign by buying AMD CPU chips and not buying Intel. AMD have been helpful but Intel needs to be persuaded. Likewise, buy motherboards that support free BIOS. Tyan Computer Corporation are very helpful to the LinuxBIOS project and employ a full-time LinuxBIOS developer..."

The BIOS update procedure, of course, requires a bootable floppy with (Egad!) Windows 98 DOS or higher. What the heck do you do?

The most heated talk this year during FOSDEM in the X.Org development room was certainly the talk by Luc Verhaegen with his ambitions to clean up the Linux graphics driver stack. Building the entire X.Org stack can be a mess and there is certainly areas to improve upon in the development process and making it easier for end-users and others to test out this latest code.

Prior to launching their next-generation graphics processors, NVIDIA dropped their obfuscated open-source driver and have said they will not provide any open-source support at all for their GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" series as they just recommended their customers use the X.Org VESA driver until they can install the official binary Linux driver.

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is a replacement for BIOS, and it is very likely that any computer or motherboard you buy today will have UEFI instead of BIOS firmware.

Is it possible that the recent attempts to push secure boot onto computer users was a response to the growing hardware vendor support for coreboot back in 2011? This is only speculation on my part, but I suspect that this might be the case. Coreboot is a badly need solution that can restore freedom to PC users while updating the outdated PC BIOS technology.

Novell lays off Luc Verhaegen (of the RadeonHD driver team), thus putting the whole project in jeopardy