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
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...
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
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
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
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
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
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
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/
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.