As I understand it maemo will run on forthcomming Intel Atom based mobile internet devices. Now to my question and appologies if it is ignorant:

Will maemo boot with a standard bios on Intel Atom or by some other booting method?

It will? Source?

The closest to Maemo booting on x86 at the moment is [url=http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer[/url] which uses the standard BIOS.

I think your thinking of Intel's Moblin not Nokia's Maemo.

Are you speaking of Maemo 6 running on moblin? It would be nice to know where did you hear this information?

I would guess either BIOS or CEFDK as the lowest level firmware. Most likely CEFDK.
(yes, you have to google for it)

[QUOTE=Jaffa;446474]It will? Source?

Well I guess the original source is Nokias press release from this summer and it reads:
"technologies for use in the Moblin and Maemo platform projects, which will deliver Linux-based operating systems for these future mobile computing devices."

The future devices refered to only talks about Intel Atom and that is what makes them "future" since ARM devices are allready here. Altough not explicitly stated that Maemo will run on intel atom, that is the most resonable reading from a linguistic and logical perspective. This resonable reading has then transferred to Swedish papers and I have seen it stated in both technical and buisness papers although I can't remeber exactly where or when.

In other words I have no reliable source explicitly stating that maemo will run on intel atom and the hole thing probably comes from the somewhat unclear press release from Nokia.

So why am I asking about the booting method? Well I am invited later this week to see the latest version of ZBIOS from Zebor Technology boot on an Intel Atom card from Axiom. ZBIOS is compliant with standard BIOS but faster.

Now ZBIOS is of no interest for the open source community since it is niether open nor free, but it is probably very intresting for some device manufactures. A cell phone is often turned on all the time so booting is not an issue, but with other small devices like the Fujitsu Loox U / U2010 it is an issue since some users will cary them around and turn them on and off several times a day.

It's like my choise of cd-reciver at home. I wanted one that could play aac-cd's and found Yamaha and Kenwood. I think Yamaha sounds better but I preferred Kenwood in the end since it start much faster and Yamaha takes ages to start playing.

So there is no reason for a device manifacturer not to choose ZBIOS instead of the standard BIOS if they have a device running a Maemo-like operating system on Intel Atom. So is the MER project supported by any device manufacturer?

It was announced at the Summit that Maemo 6 would support 3 things: capacitive, WVGA, and OMAP3.

They're working on OMAP4 i'm guessing...