[IAEP] FLOSS Grannie's Guide

[Sascha Silbe]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 05:01:51PM -0700, Caryl Bigenho wrote:

> Most of this was written by other folks and doesn't meet what I would 
> call Grannie's Guide standards... i.e.,  it needs to be able to be 
> used by folks who haven't a clue what BIOS is and it needs to stay out 
> of complicated instructions.  Plug'n Play is the goal.

> For example, BIOS can be avoided completely in the eeePC by pressing 
> the "esc" key. Is this true for most PCs?
No, it's specific to the BIOS vendor and sometimes even differs between 
mainboard models. While the variation for entering the BIOS Setup is 
somewhat low these days (haven't seen anything else than <Del> and <F2> 
for quite a while), the "boot menu" isn't available on many machines and 
there are a lot of different keys to activate it. Same goes for the 
interior of the BIOS Setup: Each BIOS vendor has a different way of 
organizing the Setup.
While usually the hotkeys are displayed during boot-up, they often 
vanish so fast even I have trouble reading them.
Perhaps explain how a boot menu works in general and provide a look-up 
table on a wiki page that lists hotkeys for known models? You can put a 
copy of the wiki page in the appendix for the benefit of those that use 
a printed copy. The wiki page is important because it's easily editable 
by random people (you need to cover lots of different models for the 
table to be useful).

CU Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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