Wow, I take the week of CES off and looks what happens … everybody is talking about UEFI. My Twitter account exploded with articles on UEFI from around the world (thank you Google Translate, since I can’t read French, German, Japanese, Chinese or Indonesian).   The big focus seems to be on the cool graphical interfaces companies like Asus and MSI are adding to UEFI on their desktop platforms. And I admit, they’re pretty cool … the BIOS setup menu has been pretty muc...Read More

Tablet computers seem to be all the rage, making your boxy desktop computer look even less hip. But that doesn't mean the BIOS underneath your “standard PC” is going away. It’s still as important as ever.   Touchscreen and tablet computers have been around for years, but for some reason they’ve always been a hard sell. I have personally benefitted from this lack of adoption, recently buying a cast-off Panasonic Toughbook with a lovely 10" touch screen for a mere fif...Read More

The wonderful thing about being stuck on the tarmac for three hours on a flight with “unforeseen technical difficulties” is that you have a lot of time to catch up on your reading. So you can thank airline-related mechanical failure for this week’s article on the BIOS and OS portability.   Scanning a pile of unread links in Google Reader lead me to this Slashdot article – “ Installing Linux On ARM-Based Netbooks? ”  The anonymous submitter is asking...Read More

If you've looked at anything related to the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) in the past few months, you’ve seen the acronym “UEFI” a lot. Not only are the major BIOS vendors offering UEFI solutions, but Intel uses UEFI for embedded development  platforms and customer reference boards.   There’s piles of technical nonsense we can discuss here for firmware developers …  documented protocols, drivers that replace legacy Option ROMs, C programming int...Read More