Before you Dual Boot – MS, OEMs and Linux

I&#x27;m now happier than ever that I bought one of the last pure-BIOS motherboards of the i7 era, and a laptop (Thinkpad X60) that can run completely free software (<a href="https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/gluglug" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fsf.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;hw&#x2F;endorsement&#x2F;gluglug</a> , although I didn&#x27;t know that when I bought it several years ago ), and I plan on holding on to these machines and making the most of them for as long as I can, because the future of the PC is looking more and more closed with each new change.<p>It was only a few decades ago when IBM released the PC AT, complete with a full set of documentation, even the full source code of the BIOS. Now you&#x27;re lucky if you can even get a datasheet for the SuperI&#x2F;O chip or processor VRM controller. I&#x27;ve observed this decrease in openness through the years, but it&#x27;s only most recently (post-Nehalem?) I&#x27;ve noticed this happening at an accelerated pace.<p>Throughout this time, all the changes that have been made for &quot;security&quot; appear to me as more and more like attempts to secure systems against their users, taking control away from them and forcing them to trust some authority instead. Code signing, secure boot, TPM, patch protection, etc. It is becoming more difficult to stay in control of the hardware you bought.<p>It is true that several years ago, it was probably much easier to infect systems with malware, but at the same time, the users had more freedom; including the freedom to explore, use, and modify the OSes of their choosing. Is this freedom something we should really be sacrificing? The well-known quote comes to mind: &quot;Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither.&quot;

I never dual boot. It&#x27;s a PITA with UEFI or not and has been since the dawn of time. It&#x27;s Linux -or- Windows. UEFI is not a problem though - people need to stop badmouthing something they really don&#x27;t understand.<p>I settled on using Windows as a host OS[1] and use Linux on VMs because to be fair, Windows power management, suspend&#x2F;resume and hibernate and driver support is miles better i.e. it actually works more than once. Oh and they really don&#x27;t fuck up the kernel every 2 minutes like on Ubuntu and don&#x27;t throw out buggy shit like Apple do.<p>I used a 2011 MBP for the last 6 months or so however (with virtualbox) and I had to go back to an older and slower T400 as it was more reliable as well.<p>So virtualbox on windows 7 it is. And it works <i>really</i> well. I&#x27;m pretty happy and I&#x27;m a picky as they come when it comes to hardware and software.<p>On my desktop (a Dell T3500 with piles of RAM), it&#x27;s 8.1 with Hyper-V with Linux in it as that works pretty damn well too.<p>Is suspect the problem here is <i>users</i> rather than <i>hardware</i> and <i>vendors</i>.<p>[1] On my Lenovo T400.

Hear my fucked up story of UEFI, Secure Boot and Windows 8:<p>I have a Windows 8 laptop. It had 2 HDDs, so I easily installed Ubuntu 13.04 to second HDD. However, during a Win8 update process, it hanged for hours and I force closed. Then even my recovery partition was corrupted. So, I wiped my first HDD, and since the OEMs don&#x27;t give DVDs anymore, I could not install it. I live in Turkey, and there is a special version of Win8 Single Language, not found on internet. You cannot confirm checksum of them because it is not widely used, and depends on the region I think (maybe wrong). Therefore, even If I found a iso on Turkish forum I could not verify it, but tried to install Single Language version anyways. But It could not verify my key, that is burried in my motherboard. I tried to install Windows 8 Pro from MSDNAA, and it said it cannot because of the internal license on my pc. I tried dozens of way to disable it. When I got Windows 8.1 Pro from MSDNAA as well, It installed without problems. That is really f*cked up. I did not like flatness of even windows, I disabled Secure Boot, removed my partioning from GPT to MBR, installed my Ubuntu with Windows 7 as it is used to be, before these dark times.<p>Now I&#x27;m a teaching assitant of operating systems course, students need to use Linux for assignments, and almost all of them uses VirtualBox, which is not a very good replacement for native experience. It is fast, but not fast enough.

OpenBSD does not support UEFI, and probably never will. <a href="http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/196288" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;permalink.gmane.org&#x2F;gmane.os.openbsd.misc&#x2F;196288</a><p>Please note that OpenBSD has no problem handling large disks, greater than 2 TB. The problem is with the horrible Restricted Boot (UEFI) system.<p>The Asus model 1015E is in violation of the requirement that UEFI (Restricted Boot) can be disabled, and that Legacy Boot can be enabled. I am boycotting all future Asus products, because I had to deal with this problem <i>after</i> I had already purchased one. It was difficult and painful to get my money back.<p>If any manufacturer purposely builds systems without Restricted Boot, I will patronize them (even for non-Arm products). I am hoping that some manufacturer will build a line of Arm-based devices without Restricted Boot. (Yes, I know about BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi, etc. But these are not full-featured laptops. They are embedded machines aimed at embedded uses. I <i>do</i> use them for that purpose. Also note that the Raspberry Pi has the craptastic Broadcom chip, and it is <i>anything but free [as in liberty] and open</i>. <a href="http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/192942" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;permalink.gmane.org&#x2F;gmane.os.openbsd.misc&#x2F;192942</a> Also, the recent release of source code from Broadcom is only open source wrappers that call proprietary binary blobs. Fsck Broadcom.)

With the locked down antics that manufacturers are pulling these days, the only way to protect yourself is to root your device and install your preferred environment on it <i>immediately after you obtain the device</i>. Don&#x27;t delay or procrastinate with excuses like wanting to try out the manufacturer&#x27;s experience, waiting until you need the functionality, or wanting to prepare more. Every day you put it off, the more likely you will end up stuck with and dependent on a user-hostile device that you were tricked into.<p>You need to run into every possible incompatibility or bricking while you&#x27;re still well within the return and credit card dispute periods. And if you&#x27;re actually unsure of how to proceed in making sure that shiny new device actually works for you, please please ask a technical friend for help. The future of society very much depends on it.

Actually, it is not that difficult to dual boot Windows&#x2F;Linux with UEFI. You just need more understanding about this whole thing. I can recommend Arch wiki article: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Unified_Extensible_Firm...</a><p>And <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rodsbooks.com&#x2F;efi-bootloaders&#x2F;</a><p>Kernels 3.3+ can be loaded from EFI partition directly without additional bootloader, no need to wrestle with grub-efi. This blog explains required configuration: <a href="http://wolfwings.dreamwidth.org/224805.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wolfwings.dreamwidth.org&#x2F;224805.html</a>

I learned my lesson long ago. Linux is for VMs. I run vanilla Windows as my boot OS and then use Linux from within a VM, thus getting the benefits of Windows hardware compatibility where I need it. This lets me do things like run nine monitors when my laptop is docked by chaining DisplayLink adapters. Note that Windows with DisplayLink will only support eight monitors so for the ninth I bind the DisplayLink adapter to the VM for dual monitors with my Linux VM. Going above more than two monitors with a Linux host OS is akin to beating one&#x27;s head into a wall, especially if you move between monitor configurations often, but just works in Windows.<p>Thus far, with the ability for the VM to bind specific hardware directly and not shared via the host OS I get all the benefits of a Linux host OS without the hassle of broken driver implementations taking me down for long stretches at a time. As an example, I can bind my ALFA WiFi adapter directly to the Linux VM and run aircrack-ng all day long.<p>Yes, there are drawbacks. You will need a bigger hard-drive (best if you can fit two in your laptop) and more memory, but those are cheap these days. The benefits, however are massive. I keep multiple VM versions and can instantly recover from anything stupid that I might do in the Linux kernel without impacting my ability to actually get my work done.

I really don&#x27;t understand all these people having issues booting in UEFI mode. Fine, disable Secure Boot (or boot Fedora&#x2F;Ubuntu if you care about it), load a recent distro and get on with your work&#x2F;play.

There&#x27;s another insane thing I&#x27;ve recently heard about - that Intel intends to lock the OS to their own (new) chips, and you can&#x27;t dual-boot or install another OS. If they do this, yes I expect them to say that &quot;the OEM has the choice&quot; to allow for dual-booting or whatever, but I bet you 90 percent of PCs will be locked to Windows, when this arrives on Windows machines:<p><a href="https://plus.google.com/+GuidoStepken/posts/bD2VHB4LcEU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;+GuidoStepken&#x2F;posts&#x2F;bD2VHB4LcEU</a>

The article claims: &quot;One reason all PC&#x27;s that come preinstalled with a Microsoft operating system is cheaper than regular laptop is that Microsoft subsidizes the cost of the hardware.&quot;<p>I had always thought that PC makers paid Microsoft for Windows. The article claims that, instead, Microsoft pays the PC makers to install Windows. I don&#x27;t see how this could possibly be true if most copies of Windows are sold pre-installed on PCs.

Here&#x27;s my rant on how Secure boot should be done. Currently, you have Microsoft&#x27;s public key certificates in the firmware, and you can either boot with secure boot on or off. I would rather that the certificates be treated similar to a web browsers, where you have a list of &quot;official&quot; certs belonging to multiple independent entities. In addition, when in secure mode, you shouldn&#x27;t be able to boot from unsigned media.<p>Now here&#x27;s where I think this can be improved. Usually, hitting something like F12 at boot time gives you a list of devices to boot from (internal drive, USB devices, DVD, network, etc). What I&#x27;d like to see added to this is an item labeled &quot;Boot from unsigned DVD&#x2F;USB&#x2F;Network [for OS installation mode]&quot;. Once this is selected, whatever you boot would have access to adding additional certificates to the firmware. Or, more appropriately, you should be able to select 3 boot options: 1) boot from signed media; 2) boot from unsigned media; 3) boot from unsigned media with write access to certificate key store [OS installation mode]. That way, the end user can still maintain complete control over their hardware, yet still get the benefits of protection against boot sector malware &#x2F; low level root kits.

In this thread: a bunch of people who know nothing about computers spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt.<p>The reality is: Windows boots fine with Secure Boot disabled. Linux boots fine from UEFI; the Debian installer sets everything up perfectly.

For me precisely this was the final reason I needed to simply erase Windows 8 64bit Professional (which I paid for half a year earlier) and install Ubuntu 13.10.<p>I was worried about driver issues and spending too much time adminstering my system instead of using it for being productive. I cannot emphasize enough how unnecessary those worries were - I f<i></i><i></i><i></i> love it! As an IT guy using R, Git, Python and further Linux tools this made actually a lot of tasks way easier!<p>My recommendation - f<i></i>* dual boot - get rid of Windows and switch to Linux!

&quot;My journey into hell began about two months ago when I purchased a new HP laptop computer...&quot; That&#x27;ll teach you. Next time don&#x27;t buy HP. Those super cheap laptops come at the price of quality and decent support. You pay for it one way or another. As for the UEFI being bad or not working well with Linux, I disagree. I think you just don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re doing and HP support is bad with no documentation.

I currently use a couple of recycled core duo 2 thinkpads. BIOS so of course GNU&#x2F;Linux installs easy either whole disk or dual boot with windows.<p>In the future, I suppose I&#x27;ll need to look to a Chromebook as a cheap platform for my GNU&#x2F;Linux.<p>Unless people actually start making open hardware...

This isn&#x27;t about UEFI, I&#x27;ve had no issues with it. Primarily because I don&#x27;t use Windows on it. Microsoft is up to it&#x27;s old tricks here. Then again, try to run OSX on a Dell. I just wish all these guys would get their heads out of there asses.

I have come to the decision just not to buy anything HP. I had two horrid experiences with two HP laptops, and two printers that went too soon--1 less than a year--the other less than a week. Off subject, but when ever I hear HP I cringe.

Back when I did dual boot, I found I seldom used the Windows partition because, for the reasons I&#x27;d need a Windows machine, it wasn&#x27;t a very good one.<p>If you boot Windows for games, you are far better off buying or building a rig designed for gaming. Conversely, if you need a fast Linux software development system, swap out the hard disk of any decent Core i7 machine for an SSD, which will usually be smaller than the rotating media, which makes dual booting less attractive. And if you are shopping for a Linux machine that&#x27;s less likely to be a hassle in any way, look for one that uses Intel graphics and has no 3rd party GPU.

This is why you should buy machines meant to run Linux, or known to run it well... System76, Dell dev laptop, ThinkPads, and custom parts for a desktop.<p>If you do your homework, you&#x27;ll always have a perfectly functioning system. My ThinkPad runs Ubuntu (and Suse) like they were meant for each other.<p>And dual booting is always a PITA... Just delete Windows...

I want to make this very clear:<p>Dual-booting with UEFI is entirely possible, provided that your hardware allows entering EFI vars manually, in a SIGNED OS ENVIRONMENT. Every comment I&#x27;ve seen thus far doesn&#x27;t seem to grasp that this is MANDATORY before you have the ability to finish installing a new bootloader. This is how UEFI <i>protects itself</i> from unauthorized OS signing!<p>I have my own custom EFI vars set up with grub2 running on a GPT partition table, all booting beside windows, as purely as the air you breathe, and I&#x27;m loading custom Linux kernels daily and haven&#x27;t ran into an issue since I originally set it up. Grub2 itself is my primary boot partition, which can then jump into the windows boot manager on the other disk.<p>Grub2 itself has the capacity to act as a custom-signed EFI boot partition (Not sure if I&#x27;ve got the wording on that correct -- but the gist is there!). This means grub can be what your bios looks for the signature from. You don&#x27;t absolutely need your kernel to be signed, provided you can get a signature produced from grub, OR you have the ability to write one while in a signed O&#x2F;S.<p>IF you want the easiest approach, look no further than any Linux distribution that purchased a key to find such a signed environment that permits the further writing of EFI variables.<p>Or, even easier -- just write then boot grub 2&#x27;s EFI-signed bootloader to a usb key to get started. After that, writing a new OS entry to UEFI should be the most straightforward thing to do in the world!<p>*(You can even boot any kernel in the world with such a signed grub2 USB disk!)

The other part that really bugs me is that I cannot buy laptops without Windows from a lot of vendors.<p>First thing I do is wipe any Windows&#x2F;Recovery partition from the drive and install Linux. Yet, I know that Microsoft got their cut and there is nothing I can do about it.<p>How this passes any reasonable antitrust test is beyond my comprehension; on the other hand what we call capitalism these days has not much to do with actual capitalism, so maybe I should not be surprised.

All of this faff is the reason why my next laptop will be purchased with Linux already on it. System76, most likely, although I want the Dell XPS 13 Developer edition--you can&#x27;t buy one from Australia. Which annoys me to no end (and if any lovely soul in the US feels like helping me...)<p>For me, day to day, Linux makes an amazing desktop and development machine. It&#x27;s been 7 years since I ran a Windows computer daily (although my iMac has a Bootcamp partition for DayZ), and I don&#x27;t miss it, so I&#x27;m voting with my wallet. If you&#x27;d told me I could do that a decade ago, I would have thought you were nuts, but I&#x27;m happy that&#x27;s the case now. I understand the Secure boot frustration, but without needing to dual boot it&#x27;s a lot easier.<p>We&#x27;ve ceded a lot of control, and yet I wonder if we ever had a real say in the matter. Oh well, I can buy Linux laptops, and that&#x27;s what matters to me. Heck, it might be easier to get <i>them</i> to dual boot than a Windows laptop ;)

Girlfriends laptop is an HP pavilion g7 and no number of tutorials can get grub to load up on boot. She wants to boot to Ubuntu? Gotta remember to F12 into the bios and manually select it...<p>But it seems like this is less of a UEFI issue and more of an HP shitty UEFI issue, since plenty of other manufacturers don&#x27;t cause any problems.

This seems to be an explanation of how to install Ubuntu on an Acer laptop with Windows 8 - <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2176273&amp;s=3a5c2ecb6245df86e17a7e1536084324&amp;p=12800489#post12800489" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ubuntuforums.org&#x2F;showthread.php?t=2176273&amp;s=3a5c2ecb6...</a><p>I can&#x27;t believe how convoluted and snafu-prone the process appears to be. I bought my Aspire V7 laptop in December and have never gotten around to installing Ubuntu on it simply because I dread the almost-guaranteed loss of 1-2 working days trying to undo whatever screwups happen.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine even one lay, non-Linux lover even thinking of attempting something like this.

I guess you get what you pay for; <a href="http://i.imgur.com/wZcxCGZ.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;wZcxCGZ.jpg</a>

Strange.<p>When I built my current PC, I specifically set it up to boot in UEFI mode with secureboot disabled, so that windows won&#x27;t thrash the mbr. Then I happily installed arch, everything worked fine (even though the double-bootloader, i.e. UEFI-&gt;grub-&gt;linux still makes me queasy).<p>The only trouble was when afterwards I tried installing windows. At least at the time, windows 7 DVDs weren&#x27;t able to boot in UEFI mode, therefore weren&#x27;t able to use the GPT-partitioned hard-disk. The fix was easy enough at least - just copy the bootloader to the correct location on the DVD and it boots just fine.

I plan to buy Microsoft Surface Pro 2 <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-pro-2" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;surface&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;products&#x2F;surface-pro-...</a> and install Ubuntu 14.04 on it, however idiosyncratic that may sound: from reading the reviews, I like this hardware and I want its features (note that 64&#x2F;12). I choose a model with 256GB SSD because it has 8GB RAM. I&#x27;m aware of numerous issues with Surface Pro 2 and Ubuntu <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2183946" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ubuntuforums.org&#x2F;showthread.php?t=2183946</a> but I&#x27;m counting on 1) making it all work with community&#x27;s support, as have some people in that thread 2) things improving in 14.04.<p>I would use it solely with Ubuntu, but I&#x27;m not sure whether I can make Ubuntu run in a usable state right away, so I might dual-boot.<p>What should I know beforehand about running Linux on UEFI computers before my Surface Pro 2 arrives?

A lot of commentary here and in the article was worrying to me. Directly relevant since I bought a cheap (good value) Lenovo G510 laptop today that came with Win 8.1.<p>I didn&#x27;t want to use Windows at all, just boot Clonezilla straightaway, clone the HDD and then install Debian. No go on booting from CD - &quot;not allowed&quot; due to the security setup. Ah, OK .. so it then boots Win 8.1 and I had to go through various Windows setups I wanted to avoid before rebooting and trying again.<p>It was then I had to figure out the BIOS side of things and saw it was all UEFI. I just turned it off and switched to &quot;legacy&quot; mode (BIOS legacy I assume) and disabled secure boot. Cloned the HDD, booted the Debian Testing CDROM and now have a &quot;Jessie&quot; install on it.

So, I have a Lenovo laptop, running dual boot (formerly Gentoo, now Ubuntu) with Windows on UEFI using rEFInd. Zero problems so far. Am I lucky or what?!

I&#x27;m still using a BIOS-based i7 system with a successful and stable triple-boot setup with XP (for some old music software), W7 (for games), and Linux (for work and everything else). It sounds from comments here I may be in for an adventure when I upgrade to a UEFI system, though the UEFI workstation I have at work seems to handle dual-booting fine.

I don&#x27;t get how UEFI is still &quot;getting the kinks worked out.&quot; Hasn&#x27;t Apple been using it since they converted to Intel? How many years ago was that? How long does it take to &quot;get the kinks worked out?&quot; Or is this more of an issue between Windows &#x2F; Linux implementations of UEFI support?

I ran into this problem with an Acer laptop, somehow I got it working by disabling something in the bios (think legacy mode) then installed ubuntu from live cd and made that my boot loader. Ended up returning the laptop since I didn&#x27;t like win8 and got a thinkpad T530 and mostly use ubuntu on it.

No problems here, I just don&#x27;t dual boot. I recently got a new machine at work and the first thing I did was wipe it and install Slackware. It was my maiden voyage with UEFI which was a pain in the ass but no big deal.

I am forced to dual boot because my colleagues use Skype. Luckily, my laptop has a mSata slot , so a 128 Gb card dedicated to Linux. Never been an issue with dual booting my Thinkpad.

Seems like a business opportunity: for companies to make their own linux friendly hardware ... or to modify existing laptops to be linux friendly.

Restricted Boot has been worked around for some time with Shim.