[LinuxBIOS] Where to begin?

[Richard Wilson]

I recently was reminded of LinuxBIOS by that /. article, and remembered 
how I thought it rocked back in v1 days, when I was a penniless student. 
Now I have a job, which equals paychecks, and more free time. I'd love 
to be able to contribute something to the project.

Unfortunately, I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer, and barring snippets of 
perl to automate system tasks, I can't code for toffee. :-(

Guess I'll just have to buy some hardware and be a testing monkey then :-)

At the moment at work we have a Via PD10000, which we use for a bunch of 
quite mission-critical things. We can reboot it as often as we like, but 
at the moment, doing so is a PITA because it takes so long. Hmm. 
Wouldn't it be nice if I could boot LinuxBIOS on it...

So here I am, bidding on another one on eBay, so that we can have a 
spare in case our mission-crit one dies. But it would be a shame for the 
spare to sit around doing nothing...

Its worth saying at this point that I don't want to divert anyone coding 
actually /useful/ things, so if I have to wait around for someone to 
have a spare moment to give me a hand, thats fine.

I'm happy to go get a chip puller, some spare bios chips, a chip 
programmer, etc. Just tell me where to get the right ones.

If anyone wants to tell me I'm not going to do much good, that's okay. 
I'm buying the board as a spare anyway. If I can do some good by helping 
get it working under LinuxBIOS, well then that's great and where do I 
start...

So, my question is this: Shall I go and get a POST card, a chip flasher 
and some spare lumps of silicon, or should I not bother?

Here's hoping I can make a contribution,

Dave,
Sysadmin,
Senokian Solutions