At the recently held Computex show in Taipei Phoenix Technology Company introduced its new FirstBIOS based on Linux. Among the major advantages of this product, they mentioned such things as PC wake from different standby modes and integrated means of rapid PC recovery in case of failure. The mainboard manufacturers are also claimed to be able to add different additional drivers and utilities into the FirstBIOS.
Of course, FirstBIOS features user-friendly graphics interface, supporting up to 1280x1024 screen resolutions. But the most remarkable thing is that you will be able to get access to Internet directly from this interface either via the traditional modem or local network. In this case the data will be stored in NTFS, FAT32 and ext2 file systems.
According to Phoenix, all these features fit into 16Mbit Flash memory. However, those manufacturers, who decide to add their own high-resolution startup page, will have to use 32Mbit chip.
FirstBIOS has already aroused great interest by Fujitsu, Panasonic and Sharp.