You must run biosconfig as root because it needs to use drivers that are in read- and write-protected physical address space.

Close all other applications and quiesce your system before running biosconfig.

Linux versions of biosconfig depend on access to /dev/nvram to guarantee serialized access to the CMOS.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 distributions do not include the device by default. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distributions do include the device by default.

To use /dev/nvram, the driver needs to be compiled into the kernel (or loaded as a module), and /dev/nvram must exist (root can create it using mknod /dev/nvram c 10 144).