Date:     Jul 07/30/10 8:02 AM
Subject:  [GNHLUG] Last reminder: CoreBoot, Joseph Smith at CentraLUG,
                  Hopkinton Public Library, Monday, August 2nd
From:   "Ted Roche"

The Central New Hampshire Linux User Group meets on the first Monday of
most months [*]. For our August 2nd meeting, we'll be at the Hopkinton
Town Library (http://hopkintontownlibrary.org) Community Room and will
meet from 7 PM to 9 PM. Joseph Smith will make a presentation on coreboot.

Joseph Smith has been tinkering with PC's since the 486 days, and using
Linux about as long. Mechanically inclined and knowledgeable about PC
hardware, he wanted to learn more about software so went to NHTI and got
a certificate degree in CIS. He has always been a avid Red Hat/Fedora
fan. He's employed as a Senior AS400 Operator at a well-known retailer's
local headquarters. Joseph's interest in coreboot starting with
tinkering on the X86 RCA RM4100. He had been looking for a good
set-top-box to build Linux on for a while, but the ones out there just
did not have the right hardware specs: either they did not have enough
memory or they had a MIPS processor that just didn't cut it. The only
problem was the proprietary bios. He started looking into other open
source options and came across coreboot. He has been deeply involved
with the coreboot project for over 5 years, specializing in developing
for Intel chipsets and hardware.

>From the http://www.coreboot.org website, "Coreboot is is a Free
Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you
can find in most of today's computers. It performs just a little bit of
hardware initialization and then executes a so-called payload. With this
separation of hardware initialization and later boot logic, coreboot can
scale from specialized applications run directly from firmware,
operating systems in flash, and custom bootloaders to implementations of
firmware standards like PCBIOS and EFI without having to carry features
not necessary in the target application, reducing the amount of code and
flash space required. We currently support 223 different mainboards."

In his CentraLUG presentation, Joseph plans to explain his background
and how he got involved in coreboot, give a brief history of the
coreboot project, discuss some of the current features and the tools
which have come from the project, and talk about how the code process
flows and how you (the audience) can start to develop coreboot. We'll
try to hold some time for Q&A at the end.

The meeting will start at 7 PM at the Hopkinton Town Library. Directions
can be found on the web site at
http://www.hopkintontownlibrary.org/directions.htm

More information on CentraLUG can be found at http://centralug.org. More
information on GNHLUG can be found at http://gnhlug.org

[*] Note there will be no CentraLUG meeting in September due to the
Labor Day holiday.

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