Month: January 2020

Coreboot

BIOS

We've all seen one of these two BIOS screens upon starting a computer:

American Megatrends BIOSAward BIOS

On the left is American Megatrends' BIOS, on the right is Award's BIOS. These are the two main BIOS manufacturers, and they have almost complete marketshare when it comes to firmware on laptops and desktops. Most newer machines don't show these screens anymore, but they're typically still running one of these two pieces of software. I'm going to cover what these two pieces of software do, and an alternative to these.

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Unicode

Unicode is one of those things people don't commonly think about, but benefit from immensely. To explain why Unicode was necessary, we need to look back at the early days of computing.

Before the 80s, if you owned a IBM mainframe, you were pretty much stuck only buying IBM computers. The reason for this is that IBM computers could only talk to other IBM computers, due to there being no "standard" way to encode characters. This meant that even files made on an IBM likely couldn't be read by competitor's machines.

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Why try Python first?

As an IT guy, I get it. Learning a programming language can be daunting from an outside view. However, I feel that everyone in today's age should learn a language at some point. I hold this opinion due to how useful it can be in my daily life.

Although everyone who knows how to program has a recommendation on which language to learn first, I'm a strong advocate for the first language someone learns to be Python. I'll get into some of my reasons for this here.

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Building a Linux Kernel

I find myself fairly regularly hearing about new features in the Linux kernel (the core of Linux operating systems), getting excited, and checking to see if my distribution's repository of packages has the latest kernel built. Unfortunately, Ubuntu's repositories don't have the most recent versions of the kernel available for some time.

Fortunately, the Linux kernel is open source, so we can freely download the kernel's source code, compile it, and install it.

This article details the steps necessary on a fresh install of Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine).

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