Debian Wants To Tackle UEFI, But They Need Your Help

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Wants To Tackle UEFI, But They Need Your Help

Over the weekend the Debian project put out a call, over Twitter, for UEFI horror stories as their developers begin to take a more serious look at Debian and UEFI, with the creation of a UEFI team...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-UEFI-Help

[uid313]

I run Ubuntu (which derives from Debian) on a UEFI motherboard with SecureBoot enabled.
It works great.

[bug77]

Neat. I'm probably going to upgrade to Skylake so having a list of motherboards that work well with Linux is something I can use. Not that there are many motherboards with issues (I imagine most of the problems come from laptops which use tons of custom firmware), but it only takes one lemon to ruin an upgrade.

[GreatEmerald]

Nice initiative. I contributed my story. Looks like it's fairly common.
There's another horror story with my tablet, which uses 32-bit UEFI, but I don't suppose they need to be bothered by that: anything booted by it freezes. Windows? Check. GRUB? Check. It sure is a real good implementation of a UEFI, eh... It was likely never tested without legacy mode, because Win7 32-bit at the time didn't have a way to do UEFI boot.

[Danny3]

The should give us the list with vendors with bad implementation so we can write emails to uge them to fix the problems

[bug77]

The should give us the list with vendors with bad implementation so we can write emails to urge them to fix the problems

It's been done before. The standard response is that Linux is not a supported OS, therefore they won't do anything to fix the problems. See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=998150

[tinko]

I shared the story at the specified link, I'll share it briefly here:

A friend of mine got an Sony Vaio Pro 13 (2013) Ultrabook (SVP1321). As soon as it finds something at the place at which the MS bootloader is to be expected, it will boot it, no matter what is configured anywhere. The only solution for dual boot is to move the MS bootloader, rename the Grub EFI file and load Windows via Grub. Obviously this has to be repeated, whenever some Windows upgrade affects the bootloader.

It might be considered extreme, but since then I urge everybody to boycott Sony completely. Even by just interpreting it as laziness, it's unacceptable for a >1000€ device. But I consider this a violation of the customers ability to chose an OS and it agitates me endlessly.

The should give us the list with vendors with bad implementation so we can write emails to uge them to fix the problems

The should give us the list with vendors with bad implementation so we can boycott them and give them "nice" publicity on their facebook outlets. Unfortunately we live in a capitalist global economy and there is only one lingua franca that is understood by all big vendors.

[eydee]

I wonder why every distro has to repeat this on their own. Everything is supposed to be open source, why not take a look how other distros are doing it? UEFI has been supported by a lot them for ages.

[bug77]

I shared the story at the specified link, I'll share it briefly here:

A friend of mine got an Sony Vaio Pro 13 (2013) Ultrabook (SVP1321). As soon as it finds something at the place at which the MS bootloader is to be expected, it will boot it, no matter what is configured anywhere. The only solution for dual boot is to move the MS bootloader, rename the Grub EFI file and load Windows via Grub. Obviously this has to be repeated, whenever some Windows upgrade affects the bootloader.

It might be considered extreme, but since then I urge everybody to boycott Sony completely. Even by just interpreting it as laziness, it's unacceptable for a >1000€ device. But I consider this a violation of the customers ability to chose an OS and it agitates me endlessly.



The should give us the list with vendors with bad implementation so we can boycott them and give them "nice" publicity on their facebook outlets. Unfortunately we live in a capitalist global economy and there is only one lingua franca that is understood by all big vendors.

Eh, it's not like Sony has anything against Linux. They're just incompetent across the board. See this little nugget: http://www.hardocp.com/news/2015/08/...0#.VcThf_D24-U

[tinko]

Eh, it's not like Sony has anything against Linux. They're just incompetent across the board. See this little nugget: http://www.hardocp.com/news/2015/08/...0#.VcThf_D24-U

Well, Then they should go down.
That's funny of course, but on a more serious note: Seriously problematic stuff will get fixed for Windows and not for Linux. Sony is not to incompetent to implement a basic UEFI startup manager, they just don't care and f**k them for that. If they couldn't implement UEFI, they should go into the water energization stone business.