[BRLTTY] [ot] Systems with BIOS-level serial console support
Jason White
jasonw at ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au
Sat Aug 20 23:42:00 EDT 2005
I'm not quite ready for my next desktop hardware upgrade, but it
probably won't be far away. The specifications would be on the order of
at least 1GB RAM, enough CPU performance to compile large packages
(e.g., Gnome or Mozilla) comfortably from source in the background, and
capacity for plenty of disk.
Naturally, I am planning to run BRLTTY, as well as Gnopernicus with
braille/speech support.
Now for the question: is there any interesting hardware I should look at
that offers serial console support at the BIOS level? Having a
completely accessible system would be nice. It doesn't have to be X86
architecture. I'm not aware of any PC BIOS that supports this, though it
is reputedly common in Unix machines.
Interestingly, on a related topic, I read that newer Opteron Sun servers
(far out of my price range at least until they start showing up on the
used market at low prices) have service modules running embeded Linux. I
predict given these developments that it won't be long before systems
emerge in which BRLTTY could be embedded in the BIOS.
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