
Which Distros Work on New Windows 8 Machines - Garbage
http://ostatic.com/blog/which-distros-work-on-new-windows-8-machines
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bcl
Why not just link to Matthew's post?

<http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20522.html>

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lsiebert
UEFI, at least as I understand things, was really about enterprise desktops,
which are nice big chunks in terms of sales compared to individual consumers.
The consumer facing change is a side effect.

From the perspective of the corporation buying big amounts of computers from
an oem, your users are employees, and it makes sense that you don't want them
screwing with secure boot. Individual Consumers still have options.

The ARM thing is, however, a bigger deal.

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Already__Taken
UEFI is not secure boot just like boot from USB is not BIOS.

Secure boot is great we just have to demand that we control the keys.

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rsyncinside
What? Booting from USB uses the BIOS.

The solution to UEFI is to refrain from using it. Just use a classic BIOS.

If some Linux distribution cannot boot via a legacy BIOS (how difficult is
that, really? we've been doing it for over 30 years), then it's not an OS
worth using.

Relative to everything else BIOS software has not changed much in 30 years
(ask yourself why; it does not need to), and only a couple of companies have a
monopoly on nearly all BIOS software.

A BIOS does not need features. It does not need a shell and applications. It
just needs to initialise hardware and launch a bootloader, and to be able to
do this from a variety of media. That is, relatively, a very simple task. You
want it to work everytime, with no fiddling.

UEFI is not giving you anything that is worth the hassle it can cause and the
complications it can add to simply booting a device. It is not giving you more
freedom.

Whatever the reasoning behind UEFI (maybe there is no compelling reason; that
wouldn't be a first), UEFI is a recipe for disaster. Because MS is headed
downhill, they will get desperate and will try anything to retain market
share; and they have a history of using complexity and obscurity as a way of
disincentiving many users from using Windows alternatives (e.g. Gates used the
original BIOS strategically this way in the 80's).

UEFI is certainly not the path to "hardware and software freedom". It will not
make things easier for any user who wants to use different OS's on a variety
of HW. But it may be abused by MS who has immense influence on hardware
manufacturers.

Stick with the old BIOS. Keep it simple.

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gizmo686
The BIOS is hardly simple. Apart from the fact that modern OSes need to re-
implement half of what the bios was designed for just to get the full adress
space, and jump through countless hoops during boot is secondary. There are
still timeswhere I have to reboot to change some BIOS setting, which is
unnesasarily inconvinient. Presumably, UEFI implentations will be tested and
stable.

Also, even if your distribution supports BIOS, that does not mean your
motherboard does.

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jlgreco
I've been using Fedora since well before they dropped the "Core", but F18
might just be when I jump to Arch. The MSFT signed shim is just too repellent
a concept to me; I will sooner use a distro that makes me mess with UEFI/BIOS
options crap.

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yuhong
I once suggested transferring the keys to a neutral standard body in another
thread on HN.

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jlgreco
It would be nice to see hardware OEMs completely neutering this nonsense by
installing default public keys of their own alongside the MSFT keys, then
publicly release the private material so that anyone could sign images that
would be trusted by default.

Who the hell even needs this "feature"? Are we really so afraid of an "evil
maid" attack? People who legitimately need it are a minority (some larger
corporations and... paranoid people?) and can remove/add their own keys.

I assume some part of their contract with MSFT would prevent them from doing
this.

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drivebyacct2
Why bother with default keys? Why not just ship with SecureBoot as an optional
feature? If people want to really be secure they need to enroll their own key
they trust.

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recoiledsnake
I wonder who will take on the responsibility on educating people like my mom
on who to trust and how to enroll public and private keys.

Or how about we have it secure by default and allow people who presumably know
what they're doing to turn it off or enroll their own keys or ones they trust
because of their heightened knowledge? Are there really a lot of people who
are able to partition their hard disk but unable to turn secure boot off? How
does that compare with the number of people running Windows and vulnerable to
malware and bootkits?

~~~
drivebyacct2
>Or how about we have it secure by default

If the private key is public, it's not secure, there's barely a point, hence
my question... That's why I find this all so amusing.

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amalag
The latest Windows 8 Dell Inspirons let you turn off UEFI.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Of course they do. All x86 Windows 8 PCs are required by Microsoft to allow
disabling Secure Boot.

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hdra
I am still using my almost-4-years-old Asus laptop, so I don't know much about
this secure boot thingy, but I thought they require vendor to allow consumers
to turn the secure boot off?

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bluehavana
Turning off secure boot is only required for x86 and the actual article (at
mjg59.dreamwidth.org) says "in case you don't want to fiddle with firmware
settings."

So for Arm you would still need a signed boot loader.

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donniezazen
My relatively new machine boots both UEFI and Legacy. I have tried Ubuntu,
Fedora, and Arch in UEFI only boot and they all work out-of-box in their own
ways.

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kuhn
Currently running Ubuntu 12.10 on a brand new HP Envy 4 Ultrabook. Everything
works just fine, but I had to use Boot Repair and turn off secure boot in the
BIOS before Grub would show at boot.

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donniezazen
There is a special Ubuntu ISO for secure boot that contains pre-installed Boot
Repair but it didn't work for me. I just used regular ISO and it worked like
charm.

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DanBC
Weirdly being filtered by the public wifi spot i was using.

(<http://imgur.com/fPeXY>)

