On 2013-12-31 05:45:01, Andreas Cadhalpun wrote: > Hi anarcat, Hi Andreas! > Installing on UEFI firmware is supported, but is a little bit tricky, > see for example [1]. Particularly you need a GPT partitioned hard disk > with two additional partitions, one EFI partition marked with the 'boot' > flag in gparted and a partition for grub marked as 'bios_grub' in > gparted. Yeah... I struggled with that before, and I *was* able to make it work, but since it wasn't obvious this was necessary *during* the installer, I did a normal MBR-based partitionning. When the boot loader failed to install, I didn't want to go back and redo everything, especially since this is a dual-boot system and I was happy to have been able to resize the NTFS partition at all... ;) (That resize, btw, was quite scary - I am not sure I did it right. First off it was very fast, so I suspect only the boundaries of the filesystem were changed, without telling NTFS. Then when we rebooted into Windows 7, it did a disk check which thankfully worked fine and it seems the Windows install is okay. But I can't think of doing this on an older system - it would have probably destroyed data, which is not clearly stated in partman. > Then the installer has to support installing on UEFI, which the > default installer does, but I don't know about the one you created. I was able to dig out more information about the image since then: $ less .disk/info Debian GNU/Linux 7.0.0 "Wheezy" - Official Snapshot amd64 LIVE/INSTALL Binary 20130505-18:46 $ less .disk/udeb_include netcfg ethdetect pcmciautils-udeb live-installer From what I understand, debian-installer supports installing on UEFI/GPT, but partman doesn't support *creating* GPT partitions, do I get this right? Shouldn't we create GPT partitions all the time now anyways? > Last but not least, you have to select the UEFI:USB in the firmware > and not BIOS:USB, which every firmware has a different marking scheme > for, but disabling legacy-bios (or equivalent option) in the UEFI > BIOS, should always disable the BIOS:USB option. (It can be enabled > again after installation.) Right, I guess this is the tricky bit. It seems that in any case, the user needs to go fiddle in the BIOS, which is annoying. In my case, I was able to install by *disabling* UEFI in the BIOS, but the reverse might be the case for others. Tricky. > > The next missing thing was wifi. I tried installing firmware-linux- > > nonfree, but that wasn't enough - firmware-iwlwifi was the one that > > was required. > > The installer should install the correct firmware, if you have (on some > partition accessible during installation) a /firmware folder that > contains the unpacked firmware bundle, which can be downloaded from [2]. > But this is currently broken, see [3]. Understood. The weird thing is that the live image did find the wifi card without a problem, but it wasn't found after the install was done. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I had to remove this block for Network-Manager to properly pickup the wired interface: auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp Otherwise it would say wired: not managed, which is strange to me... > > I also had to go in the gnome control center to make sure the touch > > pad works as expected. > > What exactly did you have to do in the gnome control center? I went into "Mouse and Touchpad", clicked on the "Touchpad" tab, and enabled "touch to click" and two fingers scrolling. (I type this from memory, from my desktop where I don't have a touch pad. ;) > What do you mean by 'works as expected'? My user was expecting the "touch to click" to work out of the box, and we were worried this wasn't supported, and in fact it wasn't until gnome was installed (XFCE failed to configure it properly). This is especially annoying on this laptop because the buttons are completely part of the touchpad construction, so it's actually difficult to "click" without moving the mouse slightly. > > Wanting this thing to be pretty, I also had to manually install > > plymouth to get a nicer boot up sequence, *and* I had to edit > > /etc/default/grub to make that work (add the "splash" parameter), > > something I wouldn't expect a novice to be able to do at all on a > > first install. > > While I also prefer having plymouth installed, I think there are many > users that prefer not to have it, so one cannot make everyone happy with > the default installation. Clearly bike shed material. ;) > That being said, I think it really might be a good idea to install > plymouth by default, as 'novices' generally prefer it, and anyone who > wants to see the boot messages should have sufficient knowledge to > remove it. I totally agree with that. One thing I noticed with plymouth is that even when you install it, it doesn't properly configure grub, you still have to go around the grub config and (*gasp*) edit a weird configuration file! ;) I would have expected the plymouth postinst to configure grub automagically. :) But then that's more an issue with plymouth itself than the installer. And anyways, those are probably things to keep in mind for Jessie more than Wheezy... > Best regards and a happy new year, Thank you very much for the response and a happy new year to you too!! A. -- Five out of four people have a problem with fractions
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