December 2012 - luv-main

Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Jesse Stevens 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Hey people, We're looking at replacing an aging workhorse Samsung laptop we use for lots of video transcoding with Ubuntu and occasionally having to boot into Windows 7 for some ugly BrightAuthor usage. We want to get one of the new Alienware M14x laptops but it appears most come preinstalled with Windows 8 when buying them off the shelf. I remember a while back people talking about secure booting and EFI madness. Does anyone have any information that might help inform this decision as ideally we'd install Ubuntu the moment we bought the laptop, and occasionally still dual boot over to Windows. We may change and start to use VirtualBox in future but for now this is the ideal setup. Does anyone know if simply by coming preloaded with Windows 8 this causes problems with installing Ubuntu and Grub? I've googled of course but I'm looking for real world experience answers rather than links. Especially if anyone has this particular laptop... It's so boring having to think about Windows at all these days.. Jesse

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by trentbuck＠gmail.com 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Sam Varghese <sam(a)gnubies.com> writes: > No. A Linux distro that can boot on a PC/laptop that has secure boot > enabled would necessarily have obtained a key from Microsoft. AIUI that is wrong. By analogy to x509 TLS, a UEFI SBK environment will trust a set list of CA certs by default. The only one that is guaranteed to be in there is Microsoft's CA cert. You can boot your own OS by getting MS to sign your cert, *OR* you create your own CA and add it to the trusted list. The latter is difficult enough to be effectively inaccessible to most users, but I think it still bears mentioning. > Matthew Garrett is good on the technical details, so is James > Bottomley. I really do not know the answer to this. That's http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org and I think http://blog.hansenpartnership.com/ Thanks, I didn't know about the latter. Of course mjg59's alone is getting me about triple my RDI of facepalms...

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Chris Samuel 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

On 13/12/12 20:29, Sam Varghese wrote: > This solution is for geeks, not your average individual who wants to drop > a CD in and have a look. It's meant to help out the smaller distros which > have few developers and certainly no time to walk through the Microsoft > bureaucracy [1]. Yup, I know, my mention was in the context of it being the method by which Fedora 18 will work on systems with secure boot enabled. The simple solution is don't buy a system with secure boot enabled - if you *must* have Windows 8 I believe you can still install it afterwards, secure boot being enabled is just needed for the logo certification (and hence the M$ marketing dollars) AFAIK. cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Chris Samuel 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

On 13/12/12 15:16, Sam Varghese wrote: > No. A Linux distro that can boot on a PC/laptop that has secure boot enabled > would necessarily have obtained a key from Microsoft. That would enable it to > boot. Note that I said "you cannot install..." You can very definitely boot > Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit on a PC/laptop on which secure boot is enabled. Note that not all flavours of Ubuntu support secure boot at present: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuantalQuetzal/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuServer#QuantalQue… Fedora 18 is planned to support secure boot when it (finally) appears, and Matthew Garrett finally has an MS signed copy of shim which any distribution can use to set up secure boot support for their distro. http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20303.html cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Peter Ross 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Sam Varghese wrote: > No. A Linux distro that can boot on a PC/laptop that has secure boot enabled > would necessarily have obtained a key from Microsoft. That would enable it to > boot. Note that I said "you cannot install..." You can very definitely boot > Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit on a PC/laptop on which secure boot is enabled. Thanks for clarifying. I really confused "cannot install" with "cannot boot". > I suspect that the inability of Ubuntu to recognise the single hard drive as > having an operating system loaded (see the screenshot in my article) is > due to the new filesystem which is implemented in some versions of Windows 8. > It's called REFS. Ubunu (and other distros) can recognise NTFS. AFAIK ReFS is only available for Windows Server 2012, as http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848060%28v=vs.85%… and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2012#ReFS suggest. It is also not mentioned here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_8 I wonder whether you can boot from CD and mount it under Linux.. >> BTW: Can you still boot the Windows 8 installed with secure boot? > > OTOH> If you're asking whether I can boot Win 8 after installing Ubuntu on a second > hard drive, the answer is yes. It boot by default. To get into Ubuntu you have > to jump through a few hoops, all of which I have described in the article. That was the question I had in mind. Anyway, at the end it may even weaken the Intel/Microsoft alliance further, and for Linux enthusiasts one more reason to avoid the Microsoft tax;-) Thanks for your article and answers Peter

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Graeme Cross 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012, at 03:22 PM, Sam Varghese wrote: > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 12:35:38PM +1100, Roger wrote: > > On 12/13/2012 10:41 AM, Sam Varghese wrote: > > > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:00:01AM +1100, Jesse Stevens wrote: > > >> > > >> We're looking at replacing an aging workhorse Samsung laptop we use > > >> for lots of video transcoding with Ubuntu and occasionally having to > > >> boot into Windows 7 for some ugly BrightAuthor usage. > > >> > > >> We want to get one of the new Alienware M14x laptops but it appears > > >> most come preinstalled with Windows 8 when buying them off the shelf. > > > > I've seen one case [1] of a Ubuntu/Win 8 dual-boot on a Lenovo laptop; whether > > > this install was done as ordinary mortals do is not clear. > > > > > > >From my personal experience, you can only have Windows 8 and Ubuntu on the same > > > machine on separate drives [2]. This install was done in the bog standard way. > > > > Frankly that is how I would do it, 2 separate drives. It's arguably more cumbersome > > but when windows fails you still have a working laptop. > > I haven't seen many laptops which can hold a second internal drive unless > you get rid of the optical drive. > For what it's worth: Many Lenovo Thinkpads will take a MSATA drive (replacing the WWAN card) + SATA drive + optical drive. Most of the current crop of Clevo/Metabox/Horize laptops will take two SATA drives + optical. - Graeme

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Roger 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

On 12/13/2012 10:41 AM, Sam Varghese wrote: > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:00:01AM +1100, Jesse Stevens wrote: >> Hey people, >> >> We're looking at replacing an aging workhorse Samsung laptop we use >> for lots of video transcoding with Ubuntu and occasionally having to >> boot into Windows 7 for some ugly BrightAuthor usage. >> >> We want to get one of the new Alienware M14x laptops but it appears >> most come preinstalled with Windows 8 when buying them off the shelf. >> >> I remember a while back people talking about secure booting and EFI >> madness. Does anyone have any information that might help inform this >> decision as ideally we'd install Ubuntu the moment we bought the >> laptop, and occasionally still dual boot over to Windows. We may >> change and start to use VirtualBox in future but for now this is the >> ideal setup. >> >> Does anyone know if simply by coming preloaded with Windows 8 this >> causes problems with installing Ubuntu and Grub? I've googled of >> course but I'm looking for real world experience answers rather than >> links. Especially if anyone has this particular laptop... >> >> It's so boring having to think about Windows at all these days.. > I've seen one case [1] of a Ubuntu/Win 8 dual-boot on a Lenovo laptop; whether > this install was done as ordinary mortals do is not clear. > > >From my personal experience, you can only have Windows 8 and Ubuntu on the same > machine on separate drives [2]. This install was done in the bog standard way. > > Sam > --- > (Sam Varghese) > Frankly that is how I would do it, 2 separate drives. It's arguably more cumbersome but when windows fails you still have a working laptop. Roger

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Peter Ross 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

Hi Sam, just as a disclaimer: I did not test any Windows 8 boot process yet so it is all "mind games" based on my understanding, after reading a bit here and there - hopefully the right bits and nothing misleading. On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Sam Varghese wrote: > From my personal experience, you can only have Windows 8 and Ubuntu on the same > machine on separate drives [2]. This install was done in the bog standard way. > > [2] > http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/57822-ubuntu-1210-and… "But you cannot install Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit on a Windows 8 secure boot machine which has a single hard drive." That makes sense, if you tell your machine to boot just what is signed, you cannot slip in a boot loader the machine does not know. So working as expected? Well, obviously there are ways around it, e.g. if the Windows 8 boot loader allows you to boot another OS from another partition. Former versions could, and it looks as it is still there. Hyper-V may give you another way to break free.. Anyway, you describe how to switch on the secure boot in the UEFI BIOS. http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/57562-installing-wind… Just turn it off and install Ubuntu as usual? BTW: Can you still boot the Windows 8 installed with secure boot? (Obviously not the other way around, turning on secure boot broke the Windows 8 installed without secure boot, as you wrote). I find it odd that there seemed to be no way to put a key in manually. E.g. create a key, sign your new kernel with it, boot into UEFI BIOS and hammer it in. If it is a place which is read-only outside the UEFI setup, it should be safe and serve the purpose: Don't let me boot a kernel I did not want on my machine. Or did I overlook something? Regards Peter

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Rick Moen 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

Quoting Sam Varghese (sam(a)gnubies.com) > From my personal experience, you can only have Windows 8 and Ubuntu on > the same machine on separate drives [2]. This install was done in the > bog standard way. Sam, here's one guy who did a relatively straightforward installation on a _single_ drive (starting with an empty hard drive) of MS-Windows 8 into its own partition, then Linux (Ubuntu 12.10 - no accounting for taste) into _its_ own partitions, and then letting MS-Windows handle the early stages of booting, chain-booting to GRUB in /dev/sda3 when booting Linux, with MS-Windows getting help from a proprietary booting-management program for MS-Windows called EasyBCD: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/11/05/dual-boot-windows-8-and-ubuntu-12-10-o… Seems a shame to feel obliged to surrender control over booting to Microsoft. I'm not sure that part's obligatory. I would actually think it's a whole lot smarter to install Linux as the primary OS with custody of the entire drive and then install MS-Windows 8 inside a virtual machine (VirtualBox, VMware, whatever). http://www.labnol.org/software/install-windows-8-as-virtual-machine/20919/

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Program cssdups
by Robert Parker 11 Dec '12

11 Dec '12

A couple of days ago a friend of mine who is seriously into web page and html5 application development was complaining that none of the CSS validators he has been using report on duplicated style names. Some such duplication will ruin the rendering of the html in the browser. So I wrote a small program in C to find these duplicated style names. It is available here: https://github.com/rlp1938/Cssdups Not all duplicated names are faults, for example you may have several '@font-family' specifications in CSS. I have provided options to record style names which may be safely duplicated so these will not be reported. That recording may be done globally or per user as required. All that's needed after download is enter the directory Cssdups and 'make && sudo make install && make clean' When you find something better just enter the same dir and 'make remove' to remove the program, man page and config files. Bob Parker -- The healthy eating pyramid as published by the USDA and it's satellites all over the world is purposely designed to bring about an epidemic of obesity, hypertension and diabetes. It is wildly successful in this aim.

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