Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

We're happy to announce that the LinuxBIOS project will have the possibility to take part in this year's Google Summer of Code™ (GSoC) program. coresystems GmbH was accepted as a mentoring organization for the GSoC and will mentor all LinuxBIOS-related projects.

There is a GSoC page in the LinuxBIOS wiki which collects a few ideas for student projects, among others:

• Booting Windows and other Operating Systems in LinuxBIOS
• Port Grub2 to work in LinuxBIOS
• SCSI booting in LinuxBIOS
• CMOS Config / Device Tree Browser Payload
• LinuxBIOS graphical port creator
• Open Firmware payload for LinuxBIOS
• GNUFI or TianoCore payloads
• Boot OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD or other free OSes
• Improve Linux as a BIOS

Feel free to post more ideas and wishlist items to the LinuxBIOS mailing list.

If you're interested in applying for a project, you need to hurry up. The deadline is March 24, 2007!

Highly recommended for anybody who might be even remotely interested in LinuxBIOS:

There's a video recording (OGG, 234 MB) of the LinuxBIOS talk at FOSDEM 2007 by LinuxBIOS-founder Ron Minnich.

The talk is about LinuxBIOS, its history, how it works, what the main challenges are, where it's used today and what the future will likely hold. Watch it, you won't regret it.

And if you want to know more, or maybe even consider contributing, head over to linuxbios.org or contact the mailing list.

A few interesting interviews with speakers at the upcoming FOSDEM 2007 have been published.

I especially recommend reading the interview with Ronald G. Minnich, the founder of the LinuxBIOS project.

Here are the questions he was asked:

• What's your goal for your talk at FOSDEM?
• We saw the mention on the LinuxBIOS website about one million devices shipped with LinuxBIOS. Could you tell us more about these devices?
• What kind of support have you received from chipset and motherboard manufacturers so far?
• Could LinuxBIOS theoretically replace all BIOSes, of are there certain limitations to be taken into account?
• Could you tell us a bit more about the BIOS side of the OLPC laptop?
• What exactly is the difference between "easy" hardware to write a BIOS for, and the "tough" hardware?
• What are your thoughts on the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)?

Answers here ;-)

For everybody who might be interested in this kind of stuff: the LinuxBIOS project's annual LinuxBIOS Symposium will take place October 1st-3rd, 2006 in the nice German city Hamburg.

In the light of the recent discussions about "sourceless firmware" and similar issues in Debian, some people might be interesting in helping with (or at least getting informed about) a practical project related to this - a free (GPL'd) BIOS replacement. It's quite likely that some OLPC people will be there, too, as the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project employs LinuxBIOS on their hardware...

Deadline for workshop and talk proposals is September 10th (if you should plan to give a talk), and a preliminary agenda is already available online. The registration process has also recently started (deadline is September 11th). See this post for the full announcement.

Now, if I manage to somehow gather a reasonably large amount of Euros, I'll probably be there.

Update 2006-09-11: I have decided to register for the conference, so I'll be there! Anyone else?

No, I'm not dead, just very very busy...

There have been quite a few interesting new Free Software projects and news popping up recently (or I only recently noticed them):

• The GPLv3 is back in the news: Stallman, Torvalds, Moglen share views on DRM and GPLv3. Very interesting read!
• Ditto for the next-generation Creative Commons licenses: Creative Commons Version 3.0 - Public Discussion Launched. See also Evan Prodromou's Debian Creative Commons Workgroup report.
• On to more practical things: I have put quite some time into trying out and working on LinuxBIOS, a free replacement of traditional, closed-source, proprietary BIOSes. More details on that later... If you want to check it out, and/or help (patches are always welcome), have a look at the wiki or the mailing list.
• The Call for nominations for the 2006 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software has been posted. Who do you think should get the award this year?
• Intel has released Free Software drivers (2D and 3D!) for their Intel® 965 Express Chipset family graphics controller. The code is licensed partly under the MIT license, partly the GPL. Thanks Intel!
• Apple has released some more code as Free Software: Apple Opens Up: Kernel, Mac OS Forge, iCal Server, Bonjour, Launchd. Thanks Apple! They switched from the APSL 2.0 to the Apache license 2.0 (at least for some of the code), not sure why. They're both considered "Open Source", and both are GPL-incompatible.
• GNU Classpath 0.92 "Bling! Bling!" has been released, with full support for 2D graphics. One step closer to a free Java environment (not that I would recommend anybody to write stuff in Java if you have a choice)...