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Foxconn owns up to dodgy BIOS crippling Linux

The other day I blogged about how the Foxconn G33M-S motherboard didn't play nicely with Linux because it broke ACPI support. Well, as it turns out the problem isn't a Foxconn one but it's down to American Megatrends (AMI) having shipped a defective BIOS. Also, as it turns out, other boards are also affected.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

[UPDATE: The debug version on an updated BIOS is now available from Foxconn. Details here.] 

The other day I blogged about how the Foxconn G33M-S motherboard didn't play nicely with Linux because it broke ACPI support. Well, as it turns out the problem isn't a Foxconn one but it's down to American Megatrends (AMI) having shipped a defective BIOS. Also, as it turns out, other boards are also affected.

Here's the current state of play:

  • The issue has been reported to Ubuntu.
  • The buggy BIOS also allegedly affects the following motherboards:  - MSI P965 Platinum  - Asus P5K-E  - Asus P5E WS  - Asus P5E WS PRO
  • Foxconn say that an update will be released for the motherboard in the next few days.
  • No ETA for a fix from other vendors.
  • Nothing here points to any kind of conspiracy theory to lock Linux out of the game. The issue seems to be a bug, and this was made much worse than it needed to thanks to a poor tech support representative working for Foxconn. If tech support had logged the fault rather than argue that the board was Vista only, none of this would have been a problem as it would have been just another bug.

Thanks to Ryan for keeping me updated.

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