On 09/25/2013 07:28 AM, Richard Owlett wrote:
I don't know if many stores actually would let you try a Live media on their units, but it is a good way to test it out.Catherine Gramze wrote:I intend to build a computer for the specific purpose of running Debian. I have had a bad experience with a store-bought computer, which seemed to be wholly unable to boot to anything but Windows 8 - there was no option in the BIOS to boot to the hard drive, or even to the EFI partition, but only to the Windows Boot Manager. Even with Secure Boot turned off.So, I am looking for recommendations on hardware, particularly motherboards, known to play nicely with Debian and boot consistently. Building my own system is not new to me, but something I have not done for 10 years or so, so the appropriate BIOS settings on the new EFI and UEFI mobos are unknown to me. All advice is solicited.I suggest that in the future take a live CD &/or USB with you. If the store will not allow you to test with it, find another store. I had no problem a couple of years ago doing this when first getting my feet wet. I was looking for a used laptop and there was much discussion of incompatible video. As I had no idea what chipsets I would run into, a LiveCD seemed a reasonable go/nogo test. I don't know how completely this would cover the "secure boot problem".Just had an idea while writing above [may be based on ignorance]. Could a full install, including Grub, be done to a USB stick such that:1. grub would be on the USB stick 2. one could boot from USB such that: a. after initial boot update grub could be run b. after reboot from USB there would be choice of running either: Debian from USB Windows from hard drive Would it catch all EFI/UEFI/"secure boot" problems? I don't know. It would be a useful solution to a unrelated situation I have.
Unfortunately there are a few things you can't really check on Live media because they require you to actually change something. True Story: My laptop is UEFI enabled. It's not hard to turn off secure boot, but the firmware is hardcoded to always, when booting from the hard disk, boot what is supposed to be the Windows Boot Manager, which is, unless I am mistaken, a blatant break from the actual standard which is to allow the user to, if they want, completely define what boot manager is the "default."
Not even using things such as efibootvars (I think that's what the utility is called.) or the EFI consoles worked. They'd show the change, then you'd reboot only to find the UEFI completely ignored your change when you made it.
Ultimately the only way to get rEFInd to run automatically on my laptop was to copy the Windows Boot Manager out, then overwrite it with rEFInd (Renamed to the filename of the boot manager.). Windows still boots fine since rEFInd has no problem finding the real boot manager.
Keep in mind the UEFI implementation on my laptop DOES let me, as a boot option, go and select an EFI application, but to do that every time my laptop boots just to run Linux is counterinuitive and defeats the purpose of alternative boot managers in the first place. It also has no problems booting boot media in EFI mode correctly.
Secure Boot is less of a problem than people think. The real issue on a lot of UEFI systems are really poor implementations of the standard, such as locking in boot variables so you have to pull stunts like the above just to change the default boot manager. This makes me conclude that if you want a good UEFI-enabled system you don't buy an off-the-shelf computer.
Conrad