Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[anikin]

Currently I'm running Slacko533 on eeepc1000 off a SD card. My experience so far has been very positive - web browsing is smooth and fast, LibreOffice is responsive, fonts render fantastically well with infinality patch, so overall, nothing to seriously complain about. However, I'm also experiencing an extremely irritating annoyance, or maybe it is a bug. During boot process Slacko changes the BIOS settings on this machine. Namely, it enables wifi, camera and bluetooth settings, all three of which I keep disabled for the other OS - XP, that is. Although, it should be noted that Slacko isn't the only misbehaving one in the litter. Racy and Lucid are no less guilty in this regard. Why do they have the need to stray that far, I'm wondering. Isn't an OS supposed to accept whatever BIOS settings there are to play with? Can this issue be rectified?

And not to start another thread, here is one more point. I have this line in the logs:

[Flash]

Are you sure your BIOS contains settings for wifi, camera and bluetooth? That's a new one in my experience.

[anikin]

Absolutely sure.
BIOS 1033 - latest to my knowledge.
Settings: advanced>onboard devices configuration>
1. onboard lan - enabled
2. onboard camera - disabled/re-enabled during boot
3. onboard wlan - disabled/re-enabled during boot
4. onboard bluetooth - disabled/re-enabled during boot
during Puppy boot - the settings are not affected when XP boots.

[starhawk]

What you are describing is pretty close to impossible. Any operating system works with and around what the BIOS will give it -- not the other way around.

To the best of my knowledge, the only way to do what you're describing is to have a Windows virus stick itself in the BIOS, which although doable, is almost unheard of.

My guess would be that instead of writing values to BIOS, the BIOS is reading the states of these devices at shutdown and changing itself at the time. This would be consistent with "it doesn't seem to do this in Windows" because Windows leaves them off.

Since it's unlikely that you'll get much help anywhere else, I would call ASUS and "scream bloody murder" as the phrase goes. This is a potential major problem in terms of user privacy. If someone were to hijack your system with the webcam on and then blackmail you... you could probably pay them off for life with what you'd be able to get from ASUS for neglecting to fix the problem. They are very obviously aware of it already, at least at some level -- this sort of stuff doesn't get in there by accident.

Mind you, anyone can hijack any computer anywhere, as long as it's connected to the Internet -- Linux and Unix are just harder. There was an article posted on this forum about how to make a Linux virus, even, although I can't remember where in the off-topic section it was...

[Karl Godt]

Of course a OS and kernel interacts with the BIOS .

Two cli commands are " dmidecode " and " hwclock " .

[Karl Godt]

And for " deprecated warnings " : they occur several times here and there and mostly they overdose . instead of a "notice" or "info" loglevel value of 5 or 6 they give it a "warn" (4) . Puppy kernel is altered to default to LOGLEVEL=3 (err) . since i boot with "debug" i don't notice these messages anymore .

[nooby]

[anikin]

Trying to understand how Linux interacts with BIOS, I've been doing some googling and my preliminary findings do say, that Linux *can* change BIOS settings on your machine. I believe this issue deserves Barry's attention. Should I PM him, leave a message on his blog, or will moderators touch base with him?

Some related links:
http://linux.die.net/man/8/dmidecode
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-band_management
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/high-performance-computing/w/wiki/changing-bios-settings-with-syscfg-from-the-dtk.aspx

Edit:
It just dawned on me, that I can ask forum members who may own an Asus laptop (not necessarily an eeepc) with AMI BIOS to manually disable the above mentioned setting to see if the issue can be reproduced on your machines.
Thank you for your attention.

Edit:
We can achieve better results if do the testing on *any* laptop with any BIOS.

[nooby]

I can confirm one thing that both Ms Win and Linux seems to alter.
Time!

Suddenly the time changes one hour or two hour
without me doing other than changing from one Linux to another.

I do have an Asus EEEPC 900 but unfortunately I don't have time
now to set it up. It is in a drawer like most of my netbooks and the
Desktops are in the cellar stored there until I have rebuilt the room.
Will take a long time.

so I dearly hope somebody better organized than what I am
will do these tests. I trust it can happen.

Another thing that I have experience of.

If one use one Puppy linux derivative like xxx forgot name
then it shut down the bios for atheros LAN card built in.

The only way to get it back is to take out the battery and the power plug
and let it discharge.

So I find this thread important but the title is misleading.

I find it more likely that it is something about the kernel as such
and not that the devs of Slacko has deliberly done this to annoy us

[anikin]

Now I don't think it was a good idea to restrict testing exclusively to Asus laptops and AMI BIOS. Perhaps, a broader approach should be taken, which means *any* laptop with *any* variety of BIOS that has bluetooth, camera and wifi, or at least one of these three items on board will qualify for testing. And as mentioned already, I observed the issue with Slacko533, ThinSlacko, Lucid and Racy - all latest releases. If anyone can test earlier versions, please do so.

Here is a netbook-kernel, being developed:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=34625&comments=all
and I am curious to know, if it can be directly transplanted to Slacko. (Probably, not says my inner voice) Can it solve my issue? What if the problem lies with those 'eeepc modules' that get loaded with Slacko? A collection of modules vs a custom built kernel - looks promising? Please, guys share your wisdom with me.

PS: somehow, my clickable links don't work here, sorry for that.

[anikin]

Here's an update to my monologue, if you guys don't mind. First off, I sort of notified Barry of my woes and hopefully, he will take a moment out of his busy schedule to have a look at this thread. Secondly, I have also (predictably) replicated the problem with two more puppies: Precise Puppy beta2 and Saluki-022. These new builds carry the same issue for me, but otherwise both of them are just beautiful. The topic title has also been edited to be more inclusive as it might have implied Slacko was at fault, which obviously is not the case, given all the releases already tested on this machine. Them puppies done me wrong. All of them.

[postfs1]

[rhadon]

Hi everybody,

just tested with EeePc900 and Slacko 5.3.3:

I disabled LAN, WLAN, audio and camera in BIOS. LAN, WLAN and audio doesn't work, if I run skype, camera works.

Running BIOS again, WLAN and camera are enabled.

This also happens, if I disable all in BIOS, start Slacko and close it directly, without running skype or network wizard.

I removed XP on this machine maybe 2 years ago.

Cheers,
Rolf

[nooby]

Here is an example that did happen to me.

I 've tested now several times looking in BIOS
and then booting again and rebooting again
shifting between Lupu 528-005 and FatDog 64 Beta.

FatDog seems to not touch BIOS and give right time.

Lupu seems to think that my local time should be GMT -2 hour
despite me have told Puppy setup personal settings to be plus two hour.

So Lupu again and again reset the time to plus 4 hours instead of plus 2 hours.

Any clue on what is going on? I have asked the Lupu people but it is Sunday
so they get back to me at Monday I hope

[anikin]

In a desperate effort to find the root cause of my problem, I've been doing some more googling and digesting tons of information along the way. As result, I can report some progress. Although the issue has not been entirely solved, it looks like I managed to outline an area where it resides. Actually, I can now boot and keep the BIOS settings unchanged. The boot parameter 'acpi=off' does the trick. There are many more, less radical ACPI parameters, but unfortunately they didn't work for me. The 'solution', of course comes at a price: backlight keys will not work (which is surprising, because on this eeepc, backlight is controlled by BIOS), no battery charging indicator and who knows how many other features that are dependent on ACPI will get nonfunctional. This mad scientist experiment was done on Slacko 533, Precise Beta 2 and Saluki 022. Or better yet, call it doing brain surgery with an ax (careful with that ax, anikin). Now my research is narrowed down to ACPI and DSDT, especially the latter.