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