openSUSE Lizards » Steffen Winterfeldt

Bootloader gets chattier

Steffen Winterfeldt — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:54:19 +0000

Since openSUSE 11.0. we have some basic speech support in our bootloader. This enables visually impaired people to use the bootloader as there is usually no other output device available at that time (BIOS doesn’t really support braille displays).

It uses the PC-speaker for output (which has the benefit that you don’t need specialized sound drivers for every hardware).

If you didn’t try it yet: press F9 at the boot screen.

I’ve reworked that a good deal in openSUSE 11.1 RC1 (2MB sound samples) and now it reads all menus and dialogs to you and spells all chars you enter in input dialogs (actually it speaks the char left from cursor).

The sound samples are pre-generated with espeak. But you are of course free to replace them with your own voice if you like that more.

Installation over serial line

Steffen Winterfeldt — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:42:53 +0000

It’s now possible to install openSUSE if you only have a serial line (without additional tricks). Our graphical bootloader frontend used to ignore serial input. That’s now (starting with 11.1 beta1) changed.

In the default setting it monitors com1/com2 (the first two bios configured serial ports) for input. Baud rate is autodetected (you have to press a few keys until it catches on). Output is sent to all lines it receives input from.

When it works, the first screen looks like:

openSUSE 11.1 installation

=== Main Menu ===

Select a boot entry.

1) * Boot from Hard Disk
2) Installation
3) Repair Installed System
4) Rescue System
5) Check Installation Media
6) Firmware Test
7) Memory Test

>

If two lines are not enough: it can work with up to four serial lines. You’ll just have to adjust these lines in gfxboot.cfg:

; serial line setup (up to four lines) ; format: port,baud,dev ; - port: 0-3: first four BIOS serial lines (COM1-COM4); >=4: I/O port (0x3f8) ; - baud: baud rate (e.g. 115200); 0 = autodetect (considers baud rates >= 9600) ; - dev: linux device name (e.g. ttyS0) ; - all lines are set up with 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit ; - if the bootloader also has a serial line setup, the port is ; automatically used serial.line0=0,0,ttyS0 serial.line1=1,0,ttyS1 serial.line2= serial.line3=

FirmwareUpdateKit

Steffen Winterfeldt — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:39:50 +0000

[PS. I coudn't resist. I just had to name the package '*Kit'. ]

Need to do a firmware update with a DOS program?

Can get tricky if you don’t have a DOS system around. We used to provide a bootable floppy image for that in the past (package dosbootdisk). But who has a floppy drive anyway?

So, here comes the new
FirmwareUpdateKit package. Install it and run run, e.g. fuk --grub foobar.exe That’s it. The next reboot gives you the option to start DOS and run foobar.exe.

fuk can also create bootable ISOs and, of course, even floppy images.

Find Your Monitor

Steffen Winterfeldt — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:07:17 +0000

Quite often I get bugreports that the hardware detection doesn’t find the monitor. Well, what should I do? We run a Video BIOS function for it, and if the BIOS can’t see the monitor, we’re out of luck.

But maybe not? It can well be that running BIOS code in Linux is not the best idea either.

To shed some light I wrote a small (6.5k if you must know) DOS-program and put it on a bootable CD. If that can’t detect the monitor it’s probably the BIOS’s fault, if it works blame, well, someone else.

On a side note, the program was created with the usual gcc. It’s really surprising what you can do with a nice include file and a linker script.