Re: what laptop to buy - suggestion for Debian project developers
On Fri, 12 Feb 2010, Bret Busby wrote:
Maybe it would simply be a waste of time, including an application to
test for hardware compatibility, in Linux Live CD's, when computer
manufacturers design their computers to prevent them running anything
other than MS Windows.
I today went to a computer retailer, and attempted to boot an HP Compaq
CQ61-412AX into Linux, using first a Debian 5 Live CD, then a Ubuntu
8.04 Live CD, both of which I have easily used on my HP Compaq NX5000,
which has WinXP, Debian 5, and Ubuntu 8.04 installed, and with the
ability to selectively boot into any one of them.
A staff member at the computer retailer, when I unsuccessfully simply
tried to reboot unsuccessfully with each disk in the drive, at my
request, reset (or, tried to reset) the BIOS, to boot from the DVD drive
first, rather than the HDD.
However, the computer ignored the BIOS setting, and went straight to the
HDD, to boot into MS Winows, with no other booting allowed.
Thus, it appears that HP/Compaq has turned against Linux, and now
prohibits Linux from being run on its new computers.
IMHO this was an error on your site, even windows needs to boot from
cd/dvd.
--
Florian Reitmeir
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