[devoutsalsa]

I used to work as a QA Engineer at Transmeta, a low power semiconductor CPU company, and Linus Torvalds also worked there developing mobile Linux. Our first product launch was a Sony Picturebook featuring a Transmeta processor. The only problem was it wouldn’t boot Linux, and so when Linus said “hey, this won’t boot Linux” shortly before it went on sale, everyone (dramatic embellishment) was freaking out.

While everyone was scrambling to figure out the problem, I went to Fry’s Electronics. Fry’s had the Intel version of the Sony laptop for sale, and it did some QA work on their display model. I confirmed that the Intel version also didn’t boot Linux, and that seemed to be good enough for everyone one to launch our product, which was optimized for Windows ME.

The Linux problem turned out to be a BIOS issue, but I don’t remember what it was exactly.