Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
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
On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Jesse Stevens <noodlepringle@gmail.com> wrote:
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...
http://www.csamuel.org/2012/10/18/paying-for-freedom Chris Samuel wrote about his good experiences with ZaReason (who made the laptop he had at the last LUV meeting). His laptop looks like a nice device. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
On 13/12/12 10:24, Russell Coker wrote:
Chris Samuel wrote about his good experiences with ZaReason (who made the laptop he had at the last LUV meeting). His laptop looks like a nice device.
Thanks Russell, and yes it is.. ;-) http://zareason.co.nz/UltraLap-430.html Mine has 8GB of RAM (standard is 4GB, max is 16GB) and an i5 Ivy Bridge CPU (standard is an i3). It has both an mSATA port and a SATA port so I currently have a 64GB mSATA and I plan on adding an Intel SATA SSD to it some time next year. It's got gigabit ethernet, 2 x USB3, 1 x USB2 and HDMI out. My only issue was that I wanted to use it for my LUV talk at the start of December and hadn't been able to get an HDMI->VGA converter so had to borrow Russells for that (thanks!). My $35 converter has now arrived and works nicely (KDE detects it as an external display) and it just works. Only glitch is EFI/BIOS related, when it resumes from suspend (which also works very nicely) it comes up with wifi and bluetooth disabled, you need to do Fn-F2 to wake it up again. Kind of like resuming into airplane/flight mode. With 3.5 kernel it draws about 8W when idling, and with 3.7 kernel it's about 7.7W. cheers! Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC
With or without wifi? Quite nice if that's with wifi on. Bianca - on my phone, please excuse my brevity. On Dec 13, 2012 12:46 PM, "Chris Samuel" <chris@csamuel.org> wrote:
On 13/12/12 10:24, Russell Coker wrote:
Chris Samuel wrote about his good experiences with ZaReason (who made the laptop he had at the last LUV meeting). His laptop looks like a nice device.
Thanks Russell, and yes it is.. ;-)
http://zareason.co.nz/UltraLap-430.html
Mine has 8GB of RAM (standard is 4GB, max is 16GB) and an i5 Ivy Bridge CPU (standard is an i3). It has both an mSATA port and a SATA port so I currently have a 64GB mSATA and I plan on adding an Intel SATA SSD to it some time next year. It's got gigabit ethernet, 2 x USB3, 1 x USB2 and HDMI out.
My only issue was that I wanted to use it for my LUV talk at the start of December and hadn't been able to get an HDMI->VGA converter so had to borrow Russells for that (thanks!).
My $35 converter has now arrived and works nicely (KDE detects it as an external display) and it just works.
Only glitch is EFI/BIOS related, when it resumes from suspend (which also works very nicely) it comes up with wifi and bluetooth disabled, you need to do Fn-F2 to wake it up again. Kind of like resuming into airplane/flight mode.
With 3.5 kernel it draws about 8W when idling, and with 3.7 kernel it's about 7.7W.
cheers! Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list luv-main@luv.asn.au http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main
On 13/12/12 22:06, Bianca Gibson wrote:
With or without wifi? Quite nice if that's with wifi on.
Pretty sure that was with it associated to my home AP. cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC
Chris Samuel <chris@csamuel.org> writes:
http://zareason.co.nz/UltraLap-430.html With 3.5 kernel it draws about 8W when idling, and with 3.7 kernel it's about 7.7W.
How are you measuring that? powertop?
On 14/12/12 10:51, Trent W. Buck wrote:
Chris Samuel <chris@csamuel.org> writes:
http://zareason.co.nz/UltraLap-430.html With 3.5 kernel it draws about 8W when idling, and with 3.7 kernel it's about 7.7W.
How are you measuring that? powertop?
Yup, which (I believe) relyies on what ACPI reports about what the battery is telling it.. cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC
On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:24:30AM +1100, Russell Coker wrote:
On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Jesse Stevens <noodlepringle@gmail.com> wrote:
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...
http://www.csamuel.org/2012/10/18/paying-for-freedom
Chris Samuel wrote about his good experiences with ZaReason (who made the laptop he had at the last LUV meeting). His laptop looks like a nice device.
On the other hand, ZaReason's tablet, the ZaTab, should be given a wide berth. The auto-rotate function appears to have a mind of its own. The wireless connectivity is really bad compared to other Linux and Cyanogenmod devices that I have. And updates appear to be in some distant future. Sam --- (Sam Varghese)
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) [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PyOYsQmetQ [2] http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/57822-ubuntu-1210-and-...
participants (6)
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Bianca Gibson -
Chris Samuel -
Jesse Stevens -
Russell Coker -
Sam Varghese -
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