Specifying mobos: was: To Tux or not to Tux

[Stephen Partington]

Option to turn it on or off, yes.

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 11:49 PM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com>
wrote:

> 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
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-- 
A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.

Stephen
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