Does Linux have a CMOS Setup Application, possibly from a LiveCD?

[Billy Crook]

The particulars of which bit stands for what can change from
motherboard to motherboard, and even between bios revisions.

If you know two systems have the same bios revision, on the same
motherboard, you can (in theory) copy one's bios settings to another
by copying /dev/nvram to a file on the source machine, and copying it
back to /dev/nvram on the destination.  In practice, don't do that
unless you're ok with the potability of bricking the destination
system.  /dev/nvram is a binary file representing the data in the
cmos.

[bcrook at bcrook ~]$sudo od -c /dev/nvram
0000000  \0  \0  \0 354  \0  \0  \v 200 002 300 377   /   / 247 254 222
0000020  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0 020  \0  \0 325   J 377
0000040  \a 251 300 377     363 346 337 177   ~ 212   c 277  \a 037 321
0000060 341 023 217   P   T   } 030   f 021 001 377 035 235   l 256 353
0000100   { 276 210 244   ) 353 324 332   / 004 345 376 372 377 373 277
0000120 366 202   L   Q 265   - 275     201   /  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0 377
0000140 377  \0   /  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0 377 265 027   %  \0
0000160  \0
0000162

As you can see, it is quite unintelligible.  But you could 'save' your
current working nvram today, and 'restore' it next week, after you
bork some setting in the BIOS (assuming you can still boot).

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 10:13 AM, Jonathan Hutchins
<hutchins at tarcanfel.org> wrote:
> On Mon, March 31, 2008 09:09, Leo Mauler wrote:
>
>  > In Ye Olden Days of PC/MS/DRDOS, there were CMOS Setup
>  > Utilities which could be run from special boot disks.
>  > If such an application still exists, and works for
>  > modern CMOSes/BIOSes, I suspect that it is the only
>  > way I'm going to be able to change the system time on
>  > this computer, or more to the point tell the
>  > motherboard BIOS that the Legacy Keyboard option is
>  > disabled.
>
>  What there were were Motherboards who's CMOS lacked a built-in interface
>  and required a regular disk-based program to change settings.  Those
>  programs are highly BIOS-specific and not at all general utilities.
>
>  Since Linux is able to read and write to the BIOS address range, sure, you
>  can do it.  The problem is knowing which portion of the address range
>  means what - and without the interface program that lives in the BIOS,
>  you're pretty much clueless about that.
>
>  The USB interface pre-dates USB "Human Interface Devices" (HID), which is
>  why you'll see something like "support for legacy devices" in the BIOS
>  config - which may or may not give you USB keyboard access to the BIOS.
>
>  Given that your motherboard is worth probably somewhere between $0 - $10,
>  why not try to repair that PS/2 connector?  Or just find a similar-spec
>  board that will use your CPU and RAM.
>
>
>
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