Specifying mobos: was: To Tux or not to Tux

[Steve Litt]

Does your Dell Latitude enable you to turn off secure boot, thereby
being accessible to all Linuces and to custom kernels?

SteveT

On Tue, 19 Apr 2016 13:22:17 -0700
Stephen Partington <cryptworks at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Dell uefi bios on their latitude series has not given me any
> issue at all with any os. Except OSX, and that is a special
> weirdness. Asus gaming oriented board tend to be (for lack of a
> better word) persnickety. And mostly this was an issue with trying to
> wrangle a dual boot scenario with Windows 10 and they were writing
> over each other in the boot space of the bios. Even when using grub.
> It was strange. But the board I have is one of those prosumer/gamer
> oriented boards so it does not have the simplicity of their
> workstation boards or dell's work oriented hardware. On Apr 19, 2016
> 11:18 AM, "Michael Butash" <michael at butash.net> wrote:
> 
> > I agree here, it is an important factor, but really only to us linux
> > folk.  Windoze people remain blissfully ignorant mostly except when
> > dealing with the horrible bioses these days built for uefi.  I
> > think diy mobo's will remain safe, but laptops are a wildcard when
> > dealing with non-business class devices.  Dell seems good about
> > keeping legacy boot options at least, and keeping some sense of
> > linux friendliness in general (they do have a desktop linux mailing
> > list people respond on).
> >
> > Getting that asus laptop that would "only" do uefi was just painful
> > as I had ass-u-me'd that it *could* be switched to legacy boot, and
> > delayed my usability significantly since forcing me to learn some
> > new method with questionable value.  UEFI just seems like another
> > half-way good idea turned terrible by letting microsoft steer and
> > dictate its implementation, as they seemed the only one that cared,
> > and obviously only about the windoze implementation.
> >
> > I'm all for learning something new, but not when the only value is
> > keeping the relevance of windoze on my hardware, which is entirely
> > undesirable.
> >
> > -mb
> >
> >
> > On 04/19/2016 10:34 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
> >  
> >> On Tue, 19 Apr 2016 10:02:03 -0700
> >> Wayne D <waydavis at centurylink.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> Some day UEFI might be good, but right now you hear too much
> >> about  
> >>>> people bricking their mobos via interaction with their OS and the
> >>>> UEFI storage area, or Linux people doing rm -rf only to find out
> >>>> that included the mounted UEFI variable area.
> >>>>
> >>>> And then there's the whole Secure Boot fiasco. No problem if you
> >>>> use a major Linux that's purchased a key from Microsoft, but all
> >>>> bets are off if you compile your own kernel.
> >>>>  
> >>>
> >>> You really know how to pee on a parade... LOL   Ya, I'm cringing a
> >>> little over this one.
> >>>  
> >> If mobo makers want to force UEFI, or worse, Secure Boot on us,
> >> well, I guess that's their right. But this is such an important
> >> thing, I think that ability to boot MBR and ability to turn off
> >> Secure Boot should be a very prominent spec, right along with
> >> number of memory slots and enumeration of extension slots.
> >>
> >> The fact that you have to find these things out after having the
> >> product shipped to you, and then play the RMA game or just eat
> >> something you don't want, is inexcusable.
> >>
> >> You should contact the manufacturer, and ask it point blank:
> >>
> >> 1) Can you boot to a genuine MBR, and how?
> >> 2) Can you turn off Secure Boot, and how?
> >>
> >> SteveT