Re: Is there a way to use Linux on the E450 ?

In article <slrnegoe5f.deo.avenger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Andre van Eyssen <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2006-09-16, Josh McKee <jtmckee@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Why? You just said that 99% of the time the OBP is used to specify boot
device and do a "probe-scsi-all" to find devices. What limitation are
you running into with the BIOS?

To avoid nasty bootloaders like grub?

GRUB has nothing to do with the BIOS. GRUB just happens to be the
program that the BIOS loads.

For the pleasant interface, which was clearly listed as the biggest day to
day advantage of the OBP over the PC BIOS in my previous post?

What, specifically, are you doing day to day with the OBP?

Also, 99% of the time everything's peachy. Absolutely fine, no hassles,
no worries, no need to use any functionality. The remaining 1% of the
time the diagnostics and features are damn handy to have.

Can you provide an example outside of the various "probe" commands? I
have been reading this forum for quite some time and I can honestly say
that I haven't seen any diagnostics advice wrt the OBP. Not saying that
there's not but I haven't seen it.

Listen, given your tone I figure you're a PC guy.

Nope. I'm a Mac, PC, Sun, SGI, and AS/400 guy. Sun systems comprise the
majority of my computing systems: Two Ultra 2's, an Ultra 4, and a 12
proc e4000. I'm not here to claim one is any better than the other. They
all have there uses. I'm just curious as to why so much emphasis is put
on the OBP (and EFI with the Mac systems) when I would think most of the
time they're nothing more than a way to boot the system. It's certainly
not a factor that I would use to buy or not buy a system.

Josh

That's fine, and I
never thought the PC BIOS sucked before I used something better. If you
want to really dig through everything that sucks about PCs there's a lot
to work through. Let's just settle for the fact that the OBP is better
and doesn't cost anything, and the only reason PCs have stuck with the
BIOS concept is the legacy requirements of Windows. Hence Apple went
with EFI for their intel architecture systems, although I'm surprised
they didn't stick with Open Firmware.
.

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