Korora Gnome

The Distro Deluge that I wrote about a few weeks ago is continuing, with the release of Korora 18 last week and Debian 7.0.

For those who might not be familiar with it, Korora is based on Fedora, but with lots and lots (and lots) of additional packages included in the base installation. That makes it a particularly interesting distribution.

There are four ISO images available, for Gnome 3 and KDE desktops in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

The images are large (1.6GB for Gnome, 2.2GB for KDE), but they are still hybrid ISO images, so you can dd them to a USB stick, or burn them to DVD media. They support both "normal" BIOS and UEFI BIOS, and Secure Boot.

On UEFI systems, there is one small quirk I've noticed: The directory where the EFI boot files are installed is still called "fedora", so in the unlikely event that you are installing Korora on a system where Fedora is already installed (or the other way around), they will overwrite each other unless you do something to prevent that.

The installation procedure is identical to installing Fedora 18, using anaconda, so check my previous post about installing Fedora 18 for complete details and screenshots of that.

Because of the large amount of software that is installed, the process takes about an hour, which is considerably longer than most other distributions. According to the release announcement, there were no significant problems reported with the last beta images, so the release images are in fact the same ones, simply renamed for the final version.

This has one side effect that you need to keep in mind: They really need the latest updates.

As soon as you have booted the installed system, the first thing to do is configure the network, and then get all the latest updates. There will be more than 600 updates to install, which will probably take another hour or so, but they are definitely worth it.

Gnome menu

I installed the Gnome 3 version on my Acer Aspire One 725, which has an AMD C-70 dual-core CPU, Radeon HD 7290 graphics with 1,366x768 resolution on an 11.6-inch display, Realtek wired network, and Broacom 4313 wireless network adapter.

There were absolutely no problems with the installation; all of the hardware was recognized and configured automatically, and worked flawlessly.

The screenshot above shows the Gnome 3 applications menu, which gives a first glimpse of the variety of software that is included pre-installed in the Korora 18 distribution.

Korora KDE

I installed the KDE version on my Acer Aspire One 522, which has an AMD C-60 CPU, Radeon HD 6290 graphics, and 1,024x600 resolution with a 10.1-inch screen, and Atheros wired and wireless network adapters.

This was where I saw the first major difference in using the Gnome and KDE distributions. Even though I had loaded the Gnome version on a more powerful system, the performance of the KDE version on this netbook was noticeably better.

The screenshot above shows the default KDE desktop. While there is certainly no problem with its performance on this system, I prefer the KDE netbook desktop on this kind of system. So I go to System Settings > Workspace Behaviour > Workspace > Workspace Type and choose "Netbook" from the drop-down list.

Korora netbook

The KDE netbook desktop. The point here is to show what is really interesting about Korora, so rather than presenting a long, boring list of packages and versions, this time I will use the KDE netbook graphical menu hierarchy to present an overview of the contents. It is important to note that what I am showing here is only the Korora base distribution; I have not loaded any additional or optional packages.

KDE page 1

This is the KDE netbook Page One screen, which contains an easily customizable array of news, weather, and other social/information feeds.

Multimedia

The Korora KDE Multimedia menu. There are a variety of audio and video players here, as well as CD/DVD burning and general multimedia editing tools. Highlights include:

• Audacity 2.0

• Miro 5.0.4

• VLC 2.0.6.

Internet

The Korora KDE Internet menu. In addition to the usual array of KDE utilities, there is Firefox, Choqok, Linphone, and Steam.

Graphics

The Korora KDE Graphics menu. No surprise, my personal favorite here is digikam 3.1.0 and the kipi tools, but there are a lot more; the most notable are GIMP (2.8.4) and Inkscape (0.48.4).

Office

The Korora KDE Office menu. The obvious highlight here is the Libre Office suite (3.6.6), along with the KDE utilities such as Korganizer, Ktimetracker, Kalarm, and such.

My intention was to see how it looks and works in general, how it gets on with installation on various systems of mine, and whether and how it is working with GPT partitioning, UEFI BIOS, and Secure Boot. 

For this test, I downloaded the netinst image of the daily build on Saturday, 27 April. There are a lot of ISO images to choose from when downloading Debian; I generally take the net installer image because it is the smallest download and it gives me the most flexibility when installing.

Once the release is out and stable, there will probably be Live images available again, but Debian tends to be rather conservative in generating these, so it might be a while before they show up.

All of the Debian ISOs are "hybrid" images, so you can copy them to a USB flash drive with dd, or, of course, you can burn them to blank CD or DVD media as appropriate.

The first bit of good news about Debian 7.0 is that booting and installation works just fine with UEFI BIOS and GPT disk partitions. Secure Boot doesn't seem to work yet, with either the netinst ISO image or with the final installed system, but I suppose that might be because this is a pre-release daily build — I suspect that the final release will work with Secure Boot, and of course I will confirm that as soon as it is available.

On Legacy (DOS) BIOS systems, it boots and installs with no problem, of course.

The default Debian installation is a Gnome 3 desktop:

Unfortunately, I had a problem on the first couple of systems that I installed it on because they were both AMD/ATI laptop/netbook systems with Radeon graphic controllers — Acer Aspire One 522 and 725 systems.

On one of them, the X display server wouldn't even start, so I could only get a text console login, and on the other, it started, but Gnome complained that the graphic capability wasn't good enough, so it fell back to Gnome Classic.

In both cases, the problem was that the X server didn't recognize and associate the graphic controller with the FOSS Radeon controller. Rather than try to track that down, I decided to install the latest proprietary Radeon drivers from AMD, and that solved the problem quite nicely on both of them.

I still don't care much for Gnome 3, although I am slowly getting used to it (and using it bothers me a lot less than trying to use Unity). Debian includes a variety of other popular desktops in their repositories, I decided to add KDE and see how that went. To do this, you can use Synaptic if you prefer a GUI interface, or apt-get if you're a command-liner, and load the package kde-full, which is a meta-package that includes everything needed for a KDE installation.

Finally, it is important to remember that Debian includes no proprietary software in the base distribution, and that includes firmware "blobs", which are necessary to operate some wi-fi cards.

That affected my old Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 with an Intel 5100 wi-fi controller, and my new Acer Aspire One 725 with a Broadcom 4313 wi-fi controller.

In summary, the upcoming Debian 7.0 release is looking very good. It is not a "one size fits all, install-and-go" release, in large part because of the omission of all proprietary software.

If you want to use it on systems that require such non-FOSS drivers or firmware, you will have to deal with that yourself — but there are lots and lots of descriptions available for how to do that for common devices, so a little bit of searching and reading will take care of that in most cases.

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Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) review

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As just about every Linux blogger on the planet has noted, the final release of Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) was made available last week. I'm running behind most of them with this post, because I wanted to get it loaded onto several of my laptops and test some specific points before writing. My initial impressions are good, in that it installs relatively easily and runs well, and some particularly troubling problems from the pre-releases have been fixed in the final release.

However, my overall opinion is still the same: if you liked Ubuntu before, your are probably going to like this release even more.

There are significant improvements, both cosmetic and functional, in this release but if you didn't like it before, you are almost certainly not going to like this release either. I fall in the 'dislike' category, and I haven't seen anything in this release that changes my feelings. I don't see that as being a problem on either side — I don't like it, so I don't use it other than to load it and make sure that it works on my systems, and then keeping it available in case I need to look at something to help one of my friends whom I have set up with Ubuntu; I don't think I am part of the 'target market' for Ubuntu, so they most likely don't care about my likes and dislikes of various parts of the OS.

Less intimidating?

I was in a SANS training class last week, and I happened to talk to a couple of other attendees about Linux in general, and Ubuntu in particular. They were very experienced Windows users, and I found their comments quite interesting and enlightening. They said that they found Ubuntu to be the easiest distribution to understand, and the least "intimidating" conceptually compared to other Linux distributions that they had tried.

I have to say honestly that I am baffled by the "easiest to understand" statement, as I would have thought that Unity would be completely foreign to them, but they seemed to have picked it up very quicky, so maybe this is a function of what you want to use it for, and what kind of access to the system or applications you're trying to get.

On the other hand, the part about "less intimidating" I think is because of the way Ubuntu has been presented and treated over the past couple of years. It seems like Ubuntu has gone to a lot of trouble to present itself as an 'out of the box solution' — there hasn't been the talk about downloading/compiling/modifying the kernel, drivers, or whatever other parts of the operating system.

For the general public and average users, that might be shielding Ubuntu from a lot of the criticism that's directed at other Linux distributions. I think that might be a bit unfair, because I can treat openSuSE, Fedora and Linux Mint the same way if I want — just load and use them and not do anything else. However, Ubuntu clearly has a stronger reputation for this kind of use than other Linux distributions.

Anyway, I consider this to be a good thing, because it helps expand the general distribution of Linux. It doesn't matter even a little bit whether I, or any other experienced Linux user, loathes Ubuntu and refuses to use it. We are already convinced, and we'll use whatever distribution we're comfortable with.

What is important is showing that Linux can be a viable and even superior alternative for desktop use, and if the approach that Ubuntu is taking to this is working (which it appears to be) then more power to them. I don't often agree with a lot of the things that Mark Shuttleworth says (that probably doesn't concern him very much either), but I recently read something that I thought was exactly right. If you don't like Ubuntu, don't use it, move on to whatever suits your needs — but there's no reason to "poison the well" for others just because it isn't right for you.

Four system test

OK, that was a much longer digression than I had intended, so let me get back to what I started to write about. I have now installed it on the following systems:

• Fujitsu Lifebook S6510: Intel Core2Duo, Intel graphics and wi-fi, 14-inch display, Legacy (DOS) BIOS
• Acer Aspire One 725: AMD C-70, Radeon graphics, Atheros wi-fi, 11.6-inch display, UEFI BIOS
• HP Pavilion dm1-4310ez: AMD E2, Radeon graphics, Ralink wi-fi, 11.6-inch display, UEFI BIOS
• Acer Aspire One 533: AMD C-60, Radeon graphics, Atheros wi-fi, 10-inch display, Legacy BIOS

The results so far have been very good.

S6510: This is a golden oldie these days, but I still have it on my desk and it still works. Ubuntu installed with absolutely no problems, and everything worked. I was able to configure dual displays with the laptop screen at 1,280 by 800 and an external 1,280 by 1,024 (another golden oldie...). Both wired and wireless network adapters work just fine. On this one I noted that if you have an internet connection while you are running the installation, it does a good job of determining your local timezone and likely keyboard configuration itself.

AO725: This is a relatively new system with UEFI BIOS and Secure Boot, and it was my first really pleasant surprise with this Ubuntu release. When I tried a 13.04 daily build last week, it did not work properly with Secure Boot enabled. They seem to have fixed that problem in the final release, because it installed and booted with Secure Boot enabled with absolutely no problem, and no extra configuration, repair or tweaking on my part. (Note for those who have read my previous UEFI posts: the one thing it does not do is get itself installed as the default boot object, after Ubuntu installation finished the laptop still booted Windows 8, and I had to hit the Boot Select key to interrupt that, but I was then able to select and boot Ubuntu from there, which I could not do last week.)

Pavilion dm1: This was my second pleasant surprise. This system has a Raling 3290 wi-fi adapter, and the daily build I tried last week didn't have the firmware file included for that adapter. During the installation this time it showed me a list of available networks, rather than just the name of the adapter, so I knew already then that they had fixed this problem. Sure enough, wireless networking works just fine now.

AO522: I wanted to try it on at least one of my netbooks. Again, it installed with absolutely no problem, and everything works. The screen is correctly detected and configured at 1,024 x 600, and as with the others the wired and wireless networking are just fine.

So, to summarise, Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail is available, and seems to work well on everything I have tried so far. If you are an Ubuntu follower, this is very good news. If you haven't tried it yet, don't let the negative opinions and criticism from various experienced Linux users dissuade you — give it a try! You might find that you like it — a lot of people I have talked do certainly do.

Installation language

I said last week, after posting galleries for installing openSuSE 12.3 and Fedora 18 with UEFI Boot, that I would do the same with Ubuntu when it got a little closer to the final release. It is now one week until the release, so I suppose it is time.

The following installation was done using the Raring Ringtail Daily Build for April 17, 2013. 

Of course, it is possible that some things might still change in the week before the release, but as time gets shorter, that gets increasingly unlikely — still, my point is there is no guarantee that any particular part, feature, or bug discussed here will still be the same in the final release.

The Ubuntu Live ISO image includes UEFI Secure Boot compatibility. When you boot it, you can choose between going directly into the installer (ubiquity) or going to a live desktop. If you choose the latter, there is then an icon on the desktop to start the installer.

The first screen in the installer has the language select, and a whole lot of empty space. I find this a bit baffling, why not fill that space with something, even if it is only Ubuntu propoganda? Seems like a waste to me, but perhaps there is a reason for it.

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Disk, power, and internet check 

The next screen checks and confirms the installation environment.

Note that it says at the top "For best results..." — these are not strict requirements, they are suggestions. If there isn't sufficient disk space available, you will have the opportunity to free some more, or assign some existing partition(s) to this installation; if you are are brave enough to start the installation without power connected, that's up to you — if you don't have an internet connection, there are a couple of optional things you won't be able to select during the installation, but otherwise, the basic installation will work just fine.

If you have an internet connection, you can choose to have ubiquity download and install the latest updates during installation, and you can also have it install some commonly used third-party software packages along with the installation.

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Wireless network connection 

If your system has a wi-fi network adapter, this screen gives you the opportunity to make a wireless connection. Well, sort of. There should be a list of available networks shown here, but I was doing this installation on my HP Pavilion dm1-4310, and Ubuntu still doesn't include the firmware for its Ralink 3290 wi-fi adapter, so it only shows the name of the adapter, rather than the SSID list.

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Disk layout selection 

This is the first step in determining the disk partitioning. If your computer only has Windows installed, and you want ubiquity to shrink the Windows C: partition to make room to install Ubuntu, all you have to do here is leave it on the default "Install alongside them". But my system has a bunch of other stuff on it already, so I chose "Something else", which will take me to a partitioner where I can do exactly what I want. Of course, I could have also chosen to have ubiquity wipe the disk clean and install Ubuntu alone...

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Disk partitioning 

Because I chose "Something else" in the previous screen, ubiquity now takes me to this disk partitioning screen. This shows the current partitions with their sizes, both in the table and in the colored graphic display at the top of the window.

Unfortunately, when the partition layout is large and/or complex, the graph is not scaled, so it just shows the first part, and then runs off the edge of the window. That is not a problem, but it can be confusing if you haven't seen it before — I just ignore it.

This screen is where I think the Ubuntu installation with UEFI gets a bit confusing. It shows the EFI Boot partition, and has it correctly labeled as efi in the "type" column, but it gives absolutely no indication that it is actually going to do anything with that, or for that matter, it is not even obvious that it is going to make a UEFI-compatible installation at all. 

There is a column labeled "mount point", and it doesn't show that the efi partition will be mounted, but in fact, when the installation in complete, that is what will happen, and I don't need to do anything here about it. It just occurred to me that the same is true of the swap partition, it is labeled correctly, but there is no indication that it will be properly configured and used, but it will be. Oh well, I just press on and see how it turns out.

In fact, the only thing I need to do here is designate the root partition, which is shown in the next screenshot.

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Root partition specification 

At this point, I have scrolled down the partition list in the previous screen and selected the partition where I want to install Ubuntu, and clicked "Change". Once again, I find this window to be short of information — in this case, it doesn't say what partition we have selected. 

Yes, I know, I must have just selected it to get here, but would it really be that hard to be user friendly and add the partition name at the top? I can't tell you how many times I have done this and then had to move this window so that I could see the parition list under it and be sure that I had selected the correct one.

Oh, and another thing I had to watch out for — ubiquity has a nasty habit of popping this window up with the "Size" set to 1MB more than whatever the current size of the partition is. I don't know why it does this, but if I leave it like that, it will want to resize the partition — and if the disk is full, as mine is, that will fail. Ugh.

So I check this, and if it is too large, set it back to the correct (current) size.

You also have to select the filesystem type from the drop-down list in the "Use as" field, and specify the "Mount point" and whether you want to format it (although in many cases, it will be automatically formatted, regardless of what you specify here).

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Confirm partition changes 

This screen asks for confirmation before ubiquity goes off and starts fiddling with disk partitions.

I'm a bit confused by it, to be honest. I'm not sure when or why it shows up — I know what would make sense (if I have changed the partition size or type, or specifically formatted it), but that doesn't seem to correspond with how it really acts. Maybe I'm just confused, or maybe it is just being over-cautious. Anyway, when I am happy with the input, I just click "Continue".

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Disk partitioning 

Now we are back at the partitioner display, and it shows the selection for the root filesystem. 

Unfortunately, the UEFI Boot gets even more confusing here. It still doesn't show that it is going to do anything with the EFI partition (you can't see it here, but trust me, that part still looks exctly as it did two screens ago), and now it is still giving you a choice of the "Device for Bootloader installation". What the heck does that mean? 

If it is going to do a UEFI Boot installation, then it will install the bootloader to the efi partition, so why does it need you to select anything here? Or perhaps you are supposed to select the EFI parition? 

Or is it going to make new EFI partition for its own use, like Fedora does by default? 

Or is it going to install the legacy boot loader to wherever you select here?  I just don't understand what it wants. 

All I can tell you is that I am paranoid enough that I don't want to risk having it install the bootloader to the MBR (or turn the entire SDA device into one huge EFI boot partition? Ack!), so I always change the partition that will contain the root filesystem. 

To be honest, what I suspect is that when doing a UEFI Boot installation, this input field is ignored, but I have never seen that documented anywhere, so who really knows for sure?

When I click on "Install now", ubiquity will do just that — it goes off in the background and starts performing the installation. At the same time, it will progress to the next screen and continue the user input.

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Timezone selection

This is where you select the timezone by clicking on the map. As far as I can tell, only by clicking on the map. I haven't been able to get the text bar to do anything useful. 

If you happen to live in a relatively small country, such as Switzerland, it can be challenging to find the right place to click.

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Keyboard selection 

This is where you select your default keyboard layout. There is a text input box where you can type after making the selection to be sure that you chose the right one. If you aren't sure, or you just feel like a laugh, you can go through the "Detect keyboard layout" procedure.

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

User information

Finally, the last input screen. Here you enter the usual stuff — your full name and login name, the computer nodename, and your password. You can also choose automatic login on boot if security is not a concern for you.

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Installatoin progress

While you have been giving input in the last few screens, ubiquity has been chugging along with the installation. After you finish the last screen, you will join the installation in progress. The status bar at the bottom of the window will show how far along it is, and you will get a slide show of Ubuntu features while it finishes.

(Image: Screenshot by JA Watson/ZDNet)

Installation complete, reboot

When the installation is complete, I am prompted to reboot (or continue working with the Live system). 

On both of my UEFI systems, I got the same surprise with Ubuntu that I had already gotten with openSuSE and Fedora — reboot didn't bring up Ubuntu, it still brought up whatever was booted before I did any of this (in most cases, this will be Windows 8). 

Now, there may be other systems, from other manufacturers that do in fact get UEFI boot parameters set, stored and stable properly so that they boot Ubuntu, but that hasn't been my experience. Oh, and there is another even bigger problem...

If you still have Secure Boot enabled, which was the purpose of this exercise, then when you finally do try to boot Ubuntu (probably by pressing Boot Select), you are going to be very surprised to find that it doesn't boot. 

Seriously. 

At least, it didn't for me, on either one of my systems. What the heck is that about? 

The Live image on a USB stick worked just fine with Secure Boot enabled, but the installed system won't?  Really? I must be wrong about this. I must be confused. I must be doing something wrong. But I can't figure out what, and I have installed Ubuntu 13.04 quite a few times now over the past six weeks or so. 

I keep thinking this is some kind of pre-release problem, and they will get it sorted out before the final release, but time is running out.

Anyway, although I hope that they get this working, if they don't then you will have to disable Secure Boot for Ubuntu. Note that this means only secure boot, it works just fine with UEFI Boot then, you don't have to go all the way back to Legacy Boot.

Oh, and one last note for others who might have a system with the same Ralink 3290 wi-fi adapter my HP has. Although it doesn't work with Ubuntu 13.04 out of the box (at this stage), it actually has the correct kernal and drivers, all that is missing is the firmware file. I was able to "cheat" and copy the file /lib/firmware/rt3290.bin from either openSuSE 12.3 or Fedora 18, and then after rebooting, it works just fine. If you don't have one of those distributions, I believe that you can pick up the firmware file from the Rallink web page.

I have just had to completely reload my HP Pavilion dm1-4310 system (don't ask), so before reloading Windows 8, I decided to take the opportunity to do a bit of testing.  The results have been quite interesting and encouraging.

How I installed Fedora 18 with UEFI Secure Boot

How I installed Fedora 18 with UEFI Secure Boot

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Before performing these installations, in order to ensure that there would be no "relics" left on the disk, I deleted all of the existing partitions. I also ensured that UEFI Boot and Secure Boot were enabled, and Legacy Support was disabled. 

I made the installations from the standard openSuSE 12.3 and Fedora 18 ISO images, both of which are compatible with UEFI Secure Boot. I decided to do the testing in four steps - first, I installed only Fedora to the empty disk; then I wiped the disk again, and installed only openSuSE to the empy disk; then I reduced the size of the openSuSE partition to free up some space, and installed Fedora alongside openSuSE; finally, I wiped the disk again and reinstalled Windows 8 using the HP Recovery USB stick.

Step One: Fedora 18 installation

I specifically tried to let anaconda make a "default" installation, the only significant change that I made was to select "Standard Partitions" rather than LVM disk management. 

Fedora was installed with five paritions; one was a FAT partition for EFI Boot, and the others were ext4 partitions for swap, root, home and boot. When I rebooted after the installation was complete, it booted Fedora with absolutely no problem, with UEFI Secure Boot still enabled. When I checked the UEFI boot configuration with efibootmgr, I found that it had cleared out all the old entries and made a single entry to boot Fedora via the shim EFI binary.

Step Two: openSuSE 12.3 installation

Once I was convinced that the Fedora 18 installation was working properly, I once again deleted all of the existing disk partitions, and installed openSuSE to the empty disk.  The only change that I made this time was to correct the bootloader installation, from "grub2" to "grub2-efi" (the necessity for this is described in my prevoius post about Installing openSuSE 12.3 with UEFI).  This time the installer created four partitions (openSuSE does not create a separate /boot partition by default).

Once again the EFI boot configuration had been cleared but this time it had created two new entries, one for Secure Boot which pointed to the shim EFI binary, and the other pointed to a grub EFI binary, which could be used when Secure Boot is disabled.  When I rebooted after installation, with Secure Boot still enabled, openSuSE came up with no problem.

Step Three: Adding Fedora to the existing openSuSE installation

I reduced the size of the openSuSE home partition to make room for Fedora, then went through the normal Fedora installation.  I once again let anaconda make a default installation, chaning only to Standard Partitions. Interestingly, anaconda created new partitions for both EFI boot and swap, even though there were existing partitions for both of those. If I had been doing a "normal" installation, I would have directed it to use the existing partitions for both of those. 

When I checked the EFI Boot configuration, I saw that the installer had created an entry for Fedora, but the number was higher than the existing openSuSE entries. Sure enough, when I rebooted it came up with openSuSE so it was obviously booting the lowest numbered entry.  I then deleted the openSuSE boot entries, using efibootmgr, and when I rebooted it came up with Fedora.

At this point I decided to do some experimenting with UEFI boot configuration - prevoiusly, with the standard HP Windows 8 configuration, any changes I made to the UEFI boot configuration were very unpredicable - some worked, some didn't, and some appeared to work for a while but then would suddenly be removed and it would return to the default configuration. 

As a first small step, with the configuration containing only the Fedora boot information, I added a line for openSuSE with identification number 0000, so it became the first in the list. 

Then I rebooted, and openSuSE came up.  So far so good. 

Then I removed both of the boot entries, and created them again, this time with Fedora first at number 0001, and openSuSE at number 0002.  This also worked as I expected, when I rebooted it once again came up with Fedora.  Finally, I rebooted and pressed F9 (Boot Select), and I could then select to boot either openSuSE or Fedora.

This is all very good news, it means that the erratic behavior I had previously seen, with EFI Boot configuration changes getting lost is indeed a result of some sort of special handling set up either by HP or Microsoft. 

If I spent a lot more time experimenting and observing this I might be able to figure out specifically which one did it (or both), but I don't really care enough to fight with it any more. Suffice it to say, for those who want to know if Linux-only installation with UEFI boot is possible, the answer is yes.

Step Four: Restore the original Windows 8 from the HP recovery media 

I removed the existing disk partitions again, so it was starting with an empty disk, and then booted the USB stick that HP support had sent me. The difference in time required here was really astounding.  Installing either Fedora or openSuSE from scratch required less than 30 minutes, but the Windows 8 "recovery" has been running for over two hours now, and it is still not done.  It just finally asked me for the user name and password, so at least it is getting close.  Wow.

OpenSuSE 12.3: In-depth and hands-on

OpenSuSE 12.3: In-depth and hands-on

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Finally, I got a bit more evidence that someone is "fiddling with the knobs in the back" when Windows is installed. After the Windows installation finally finished, I reduced the size of the C: partition and installed openSuSE into the free space. 

When that had finished, but before rebooting, I checked the EFI boot configuration again and as expected, I saw that it had added its usual two entries, one for Secure Boot and one for normal boot. 

Unexpectedly, though, the Windows installation had created the entry for its Boot Loader with number 0002 (no idea why it did this, there was nothing else in the list at that time), and now openSuSE had created the non-secure entry with number 0001 and the Secure Boot entry with number 0003. 

Hmmm.  If this works as I would expect it to, the system should now boot openSuSE. 

But of course it didn't, when I rebooted it came up with Windows 8.  I have no idea why - it certainly isn't because of the sequence of the numbers, and it isn't because of the BootOrder configuration, so there must be some kind of hidden priority for the Windows Boot Loader.  Sigh.

In addition to normal 32-bit distribution, this time, a 64-bit version is available as well. PCLOS is a "rolling release", so updates are continuously released as they are ready, rather than being held back for scheduled major updates.

That means this is a "rollup" release, which simply incorporates all of the updates that have been released since the last ISO rollup was made — for the 32-bit version, that was just in February this year, but for the 64-bit version, I don't even remember when the last release was: There has been a 64-bit Release Candidate available since shortly after the 32-bit rollup was released, but before that, I don't know.

The 32-bit release notes give a rundown of new/improved features; in my opinion, the most important is the update to KDE 4.10.1, the most noticeable is the very nice new theme graphics, the most beneficial is the new QT-update notifier, and the most disappointing is Linux kernel 3.2.18.

That last bit of disappointment is probably not fair, because it is well known that PCLOS is based on Debian, and the developers don't try to keep up with newer kernels beyond Debian, so the release contains what is to be expected.

The most impressive aspect of the PCLinuxOS 32-bit release is the variety of distributions. The minime version is stripped down to a svelte 549MB ISO image. This makes it small and light, without a lot of extra features beyond the base operating system, so if you are installing on older hardware, or with limited disk or memory capacity, or you really want the ISO to fit on a single CD-R disk, you should be happy with this one.

The standard KDE Desktop version weighs in at 1.66GB, so you'll need a DVD or at least a 2GB USB stick for it. It includes a lot of common packages that have been omitted from minime to save space, such as LibreOffice, GIMP, VirtualBox, and a lot more.

The FullMonty version lumbers in at a hefty 4GB, and looks like it includes pretty much everything anyone could think to toss in there. The nicest part of this one is probably the variety of pre-configured desktops. Check the FullMonty detailed description to see some nice examples of these.

A 64-bit version of the "normal" KDE Desktop version is also available. There has been a Release Candidate of this version available since shortly after the previous 32-bit rollup was released, so it is good news to see it become a final release. The contents and features appear to be essentially the same as the 32-bit KDE Desktop version.

The contents of the standard 32-bit and 64-bit versions are essentially the same:

• Linux kernel 3.2.18: This is probably the single largest drawback to this distribution, because there have been a lot of drivers added and improved in later versions of the kernel. Two things that jumped out at me: There is no driver for the Raling 3290 wi-fi adapter, and the ClickPad is not properly supported. The former turns out not to be so bad, because I can't use PCLOS on that system anyway (see below), but the latter is a killer; I had forgotten how totally awful the blasted ClickPad is without the correct driver. It took less than five minutes of struggling with it before I was ready to launch it out the window.

• KDE 4.10.1: This is one of the biggest advantages to this distribution. The latest KDE, and it is a beauty.

• LibreOffice 4.01

• DigiKam 3.1.0: I am a fanatic about digiKam, and this is the first distribution I have seen with 3.1, so I am very pleased about this.

I have to make one very significant point about this distribution, however. Not only does it not include UEFI Boot support, it also does not support GPT partitioned disks.

As I have mentioned several times over the past few articles about UEFI and GPT, this can be particularly treacherous, because it will not complain, it looks like it is going to work — but unless you are very lucky, and have a very simple disk layout, there is a good chance that it will get confused and destroy one or more existing partitions on your disk.

If you have a GPT disk (if you aren't sure, read that as "if you have Windows 8 and/or UEFI BIOS"), I would strongly urge you not to try to install this distribution.

In summary, this is a welcome release. It seems to me that it adds significant polish to the previous rollup release, and the 64-bit distribution is a big plus. It has a very active and very dedicated user community, and if you try it and find that you need help, you will almost certainly get it in the forums.

However, I have decided not to do that quite yet, first because I'm getting pretty bored with it, and second because Ubuntu 13.04 is supposed to be released at the end of this month, so I think I will wait until we are closer to the release date before writing that. 

Instead, I am going to pick up a thread that I mentioned in each of the previous UEFI Boot posts and I have promised to get back to "real soon now". 

This one is going to be somewhat more technical, and will have a lot less pretty pictures included, so you might want to get a strong cup of coffee before starting, if you are determined to stay awake until the end.  For the impatient readers, I will start with a summary:

• The UEFI boot systems I have always boot the file bootmgfw.efi from the EFI Boot partition, come hell or high water.
• All of my attempts to change the configuration to get it to boot something else have eventually failed.
• The UEFI-compatible Linux systems I have installed include the grub2-efi boot loader. Getting the computer to boot this by default is the trick.
• The simplest way to permanently achieve this is to copy the Linux bootloader files to the default bootloader directory, and then rename the Linux bootloader to bootmgfw.efi

That's it, in a nutshell. All the gory details follow, bit I will say this as clearly as possible first. Mucking about with the boot process on your computer can be dangerous. If it all goes pear-shaped you may have to reload from scratch. 

The details and procedures which I present here are as complete and accurate as I could make them, and work on my HP and Acer systems, but there may be significant differences in UEFI implementation, so don't be surprised if things look different or work differently on your computer. 

Oh, and by the way, based on the information I have read about UEFI boot, Linux, and Samsung computers, even I would not try this on one of those, period.

So here come the details of my experiments.

If you have a UEFI Boot system, and you followed the details of either or both of my  preceding posts, when you rebooted your system after installing Linux you probably got a surprise - no sign of Linux. Just the same old ordinary Windows 8 boot. 

No Grub boot menu, no operating system selection, no Linux boot.  Just Windows. 

There are two related "problems" at work here - first, the whole theory of booting has changed with UEFI boot, and second the current state of UEFI Boot Managers is very poor (in my opinion, and based on my experience with HP and Acer UEFI systems). 

I will explain each of those problems in more detail separately.

The boot process has been radically changed with UEFI boot.  As I understand it, the process is now broken into two pieces, one is the "Boot Manager", which finds, presents and controls what can be booted, and the other is the "Boot Loader", which actually does the booting (load and run) of whatever is selected by the Boot Manager.

By the way, if I have this completely wrong, please feel free to correct me in the comments - I'm sure there will be plenty of "corrections" anyway, many of which will themselves be completely wrong, nothing new in that.

So when the computer is initially powered on, the Boot Manager looks around and decides what candidates for booting are available, and which one has first priority.  Unless it is interrupted (by you pressing the boot selection key) it will then try to pass control to whatever boot loader it decides comes first.

The Boot Manager which came on my HP and Acer systems is pretty grim, to be kind. 

It is difficult to configure, it is prone to tossing whatever configuration changes you might make and going back to its original default configuration, its on-screen presentation looks like something that came out of the original War Games movie from 1983, and well, it is just generally not very pleasant. The best that can be said for it is that it gets the job done, more or less. 

If you take the time to find and read the documentation for the UEFI boot system in general, and the Boot Manager in particular, it sounds like it could be a lot better than that.  It could have a Graphical User Interface, it could present wonderful classy menus of boot candidates, it could have a very spiffy configuration center, and so on. 

However, the ones I have experience with are really good at exactly one thing - starting the Windows Boot Loader.  Well, two things... they are also really good at throwing away everything I try to do to configure them, and returning to the first thing they are really good at.

I wrote not long ago about the rEFInd boot loader, which does a lot of the things which I just mentioned, but it has to be installed as a separate package after installing Linux, and it is not easy to get working with Secure Boot enabled. My intention here is to show how I get dual-boot/multi-boot working with a minimum effort, using only what gets installed with a standard Linux distribution. So I will not go into any more detail here about rEFInd.

The Windows Boot Loader is also supposed to be capable of booting multiple operating systems. I have tried to get it to do this with Linux installed in addition to Windows, and I have failed miserably. I have read everything I can find on the Internet about configuring it, and I have tried to use my knowledge from configuring the boot loaders in Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. 

I have tried using BCDedit and easyBCD, and I have never managed to get it to do anything other than boot Windows 8.  I have gotten it to present a graphical "selection" menu with pretty buttons to click for Windows 8 and whatever else I am trying to add, but none of the buttons other than Windows 8 ever actually works. 

Perhaps I am just too dense to understand it, and if anyone would like to enlighten me, with a complete and functioning example, please feel free to do so. Oh, make that a complete and functioning example which includes booting Linux, because being able to "multi-boot" several different versions of Windows is not interesting to me, and doesn't seem to be particularly difficult...

So, in my case there are only two ways to boot Linux - either interrupt the Boot Manager, by pressing whatever the Boot Selection key is on your computer (ESC, F9, F12 or some such), or install some other Boot Loader and convince the Boot Manager to start that by default instead of the Windows Boot Loader.  If you take the first course, and interrupt the Boot Manager, you get something like this:

This screen shot was taken from one of the system where I have openSuSE and Fedora both installed in addition to Windows 8. I can move up and down with the arrow keys, and then press return when I am on the one I want to boot. I wrote something very similar to this in a shell script in about 1982, and I am shocked and disappointed to find it here...  If only I had thought to patent it at the time, I could be making a fortune today! Or not...

Well, whatever, it is what it is, and I find it to be unpleasant and inflexibie, so I need to figure out how to replace it with something I like better. To help me do that, I will use the Linux efibootmgr utility to list and edit the boot manager configuration. Here is the list from one of my systems:

 The first few lines are what I am interested in, it is a list which corresponds to what the Boot Manager presented in the boot selection list. I am not going to spend a lot of time on things that I have learned the hard way don't work here, I will just say that there are a lot of options for the efibootmgr program which allow you to add and delete items and change the boot order (use the -? option to list them all), but most everything I did, which appeared to work when I listed them again, ended up being thrown away either during the next reboot, or the next time Windows was booted. 

So the only really important bit of information here is the path of the Windows Boot Loader, which is the object that the UEFI Boot Manager insists on booting by default - "\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi". I'm hoping that if I replace that file with the boot loader of my choice, I will be able to trick the Boot Manager into doing what I want.

The paths used by the Boot Manager are relative to the EFI Boot Partition, which is /dev/sda2 on both of my systems, and which is mounted on /boot/efi under Linux - the actual partition may change, but the mount point will always be the same. Linux installations which are UEFI Boot compatible will create their own directory to contain their boot loader binary and configuration files, so on my system I have /boot/efi/EFI/opensuse and /boot/efi/EFI/fedora.  Their contents are:

 The important things there for my purpose are the grub EFI binaries, which you can boot directly if you don't have Secure Boot enabled, and the shim EFI binaries, which are what you have to boot if you do have Secure Boot enabled. Assuming that I want to boot the openSuSE version of grub by default, what I do next is copy the contents of this directory to /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/. Please note that I said copy, not move, because you don't want to destroy your existing boot configuration, so if things go wrong you can always recover by using the boot select key. Also, you don't absolutely have to copy everything, but it doesn't hurt to do so; if you have gotten this far and are still awake, you should be able to figure out which bits you don't need without too much difficulty, at least by trial-and-error if nothing else.

Once I have the openSuSE boot files in the default boot directory, all I have to do is rename things so that the boot manager runs grub rather than the Windows Boot Loader. I try to be careful and leave myself a way to recover from misunderstandings and mistakes, so I first rename the file for the Windows Boot Loader from bootmgfw.efi to something like bootmgfw.ms. 

Then I rename shim.efi to bootmgfw.efi and I am done. The shim file will boot whether Secure Boot is enabled or not, but if you know that you are going to have Secure Boot disabled, and you want to save one step and simplify the boot process a bit, you can rename grubx64.efi to bootmgfw.efi instead. 

But be aware, if you do this, and then later enable Secure Boot, the next time you try to boot the Boot Manager will notice that something is wrong. 

What it does seems to depend on the specific system on which it happens; it can range from just using a fall-back boot image which will start Windows 8, or dropping into the boot selection menu, or restoring a copy of the original boot files, or it can even go so far as to run what seems to be a very large and very complex Windows recovery procedure in order to get back to the factory boot configuration.

When you reboot after making these changes, you should get the openSuSE grub boot loader, which will give you a simple graphic menu where you can choose to boot either openSuSE or Windows 8.  Hooray! 

There are just a few loose ends that I would like to clean up.

For the vast majority of people, who are trying to set up a simple dual-boot configuration with Windows and Linux, this procedure will work equally well using either openSuSE or Fedora. In my case I want to set up a multi-boot configuration with several different Linux distributions, so I always use openSuSE as the base because I have found that its grub is more flexible, and at least with Secure Boot disabled it is able to boot other EFI images (such as Fedora and Ubuntu) and even non-EFI "traditional" boot distributions such as Linux Mint.

Please remember, mucking about with the boot configuration is dangerous. Make sure that you have complete backup and/or recovery media and procedures on hand before you try this. 

As I have mentioned a couple of times, there seem to be differences between vendors in the details of the implementation, checking and automatic "repair/recovery" procedures, so don't expect that I have covered all the possibilities here, and don't be surprised if at some point you try to boot and rather than starting grub your computer starts showing that blasted rotating circle of dots, indicating that Windows is doing something whether you want it to or not. 

If that happens, what I would do is not try to stop it, just let it finish, and you should be able to go back and "pick up the pieces" or just start over again.

What I hope to show here is that in my experience Fedora 18 installs and runs just fine with UEFI Secure Boot, and second that the much-maligned anaconda installer is not as bad as a lot of people have made it out to be.

I will skip the first couple of steps that were described and illustrated in the previous post, which use either the Windows Disk Management or one of the Linux disk/partition managers to free up sufficient space on the disk for the installation.

When booting the Fedora Live media, I am prompted to login as "Live User" (no password). 

I am then given a choice between going directly to the installation (anaconda), or going to the Live desktop, which you can use as a normal Linux system. 

One useful thing to do at the live desktop is to confirm that all the hardware is recognized and working correctly before actually installing Fedora. Also, if you have a non-U.S. keyboard layout it can be convenient to set that here, so that your keyboard will be read properly during installation.

The screen shot above shows the Fedora 18 Gnome Live desktop; to start the installation, I clicked the icon at the bottom of the favorites list.

The first anaconda screen lets you select the language for the installation. 

If you situation is "normal" and your keyboard is the default for whatever language you select, you can click that here and save a step later. Unfortunately for me, I install in English but usually use a Swiss German keyboard, so I can't take advantage of this. Oh well, I'll get a chance later to choose the correct keyboard layout.

In this screen you can choose if you want to use a wired or wireless network connection during installation. The network connection will be used to determine location, and possibly to fetch updates during installation. Of course it is possible to make the installation without a network connection, if you don't have wired and don't want to bother with wireless at this point.

This is anaconda's central dispatcher. 

After getting through the two preliminary screens, the rest of the installation is a "star" or "hub and spoke" process, from this screen you go off to various other steps as necessary, always returning here until everything has been defined, anaconda is satisfied, and you are ready to click 'Begin Installation'. 

The screen shown above is from the Live ISO image; if you are installing from the DVD image, there will be more options in this screen, for example to select other software and desktops to install.

Note that the current values for each of the options is displayed (TZ America/New York and KB English), there is a warning both beside the Storage option and at the bottom of the window, indicating that the input is mandatory and has not yet been made, and the 'Begin Installation' button is not yet active.

Here I have gone to Date & Time, where I can select the correct location or timezone, and manually set the system time and date, or turn on NTP for network time control.  You can select the location either by clicking on the map, or from the drop-down lists for region and city.  When this screen is finished, I clicked 'Done' to return to the hub.

This is the keyboard selection.  The default layout is English/U.S. (of course).  Click the "+" to add another layout, and select an existing layout and click "-" to remove it.  You can leave multiple layouts selected, and change their order (precedence) with the arrow buttons. When the definition is correct, click 'Done' to return to the hub.

A comment about keyboards - I typically use a Swiss German, German, or US keyboard. 

Most people will know about the difference between "QWERTY" and "QWERTZ" keyboards.  But I have occasionally used French keyboards which have an "AZERTY" layout. I suspect that this is something the French are doing specifically to torment Americans, because it is guaranteed to have you pounding your head on the desk (or directly on the keyboard) within the first five minutes.  Whatever the case, you can select the specific keyboard or multiple keyboards in this screen.

Now I am going into the most critical - and perhaps most controversial - area, the disk layout. 

The obvious part of this screen is the selection of the target physical disk.  The less obvious part is lurking under Full disk summary and options... at the bottom of the screen.  If you don't want to install a bootloader at all (unusual, but not unheard of), click this label to get the screen where you can disable grub installation. Also, if you want full data encryption click the check box for that. I click 'Continue' to proceed.

At this point I have entered enough information for anaconda to complete the disk partitioning. It will use LVM for disk/partition management; if you don't want LVM, click on Partition Scheme configuration and you can change it, as shown here, to Standard Partition.

It will also make the following assumptions about the disk layout:

• A new EFI Boot partition will be created
• A new swap partition will be created
• A root partition will be created
• A home partition will be created

If any of these assumptions are not to your likeing (almost none of them are to mine, as I want to use the existing EFI Boot partition that was originally created for Windows 8, the existing swap partition which I created for openSuSE, and I don't want a separate home partition on this system), then check the box for 'Let me customize...'  Either way, click 'Continue' to return to the hub, or proceed to the detailed partitioning screen.

This is probably the anaconda screen which has gotten the most criticism. 

It is, to say the least, not entirely intuitive what is going on here, what it is showing you, what needs to be done, and how to do it.  Other than that, it is really good... 

What anaconda is trying to do here is show the disk layout grouped by logical function or usage, rather than just showing a linear list or diagram of disk partitions. 

This is probably a good thing (once you understand it) because it really does make more sense to look at it this way — but it is totally different from anything that has been done before, and that has generated a lot of backlash from users. 

Particularly confusing is the fact that some "shared" partitions, such as EFI Boot and linux-swap, can be listed in several of the logical groups. That makes sense when you think about how they are used, they really are part of several different logical installations, but it is very confusing if you are accustomed to thinking of a single linear view of the disk layout.

The first group in list will be the new Fedora installation. As yet nothing has been allocated to it; if I click on the 'Click here to create them automatically' label, it will create the partitions as I described in the previous screen (EFI, root, home and swap).  You could then accept that, or further customize it as you want. 

However, I am going to manually create the layout that I want, so the first thing I do is click on the "+" at the bottom of the window, to create a new partition for the root filesystem.

To create a new partition, I specify where it is to be mounted (root) and the size (64GB).

Here I have clicked on the "Unknown Linux" group (this is actually the openSuSE installation which I did previously), and it opened to show me the contents. What I need to do is pick up the EFI Boot partition, so Fedora will use the same one as Windows 8 (and openSuSE), rather than creating a new EFI partition for its own use.

First I click on the EFI Boot partition, then in the Mount Point field I enter /boot/efi, then I click 'Apply Changes'.

Finally, I click on the 'New Fedora 18 Installation' group, to make sure that the EFI partition has been added to my new configuration.

Zowie, there's some magic for you!  anaconda has noticed the existing swap partition and added it to our new installation automatically!  At this point, I am happy - I have a root, swap and EFI boot partition. If I would like to add a separate home partition, or anything else, I can do that in the same way that root was added, just click "+" and enter the mount point and size.

When I am happy with the partitioning, I click 'Finish Partitioning' to return to the hub.

Note: When returning from the Storage screens to the hub, it will not look like this at first.  It will still have the warning triangle on the Storage configuration, the yellow note across the bottom saying that you have to complete the marked items before continuing, and the installation button will not be active. 

It takes a short time for anaconda to confirm that you have created a valid disk layout, and then the screen will change to that shown above.

I click 'Begin Installation' to continue.

This is the screen once installation has started. 

I find the placement of the Root Password option in this screen to be rather curious - they have such a nice hub-and-spoke layout for most things in the previous step, why is setting the root password not included there? 

I know that Ubuntu's ubiquity installer has had a split of information required before starting the install, and information not needed until the end for configuration, the idea being that you can "save time" or "optimize the process" by starting the file copy as soon as enough information has been given, and then gather the rest of the information while the copying is done in the background. 

But at least two of the things in the preceding anaconda hub screen are not required for the basic file copy (timezone and keyboard), so if they want to "optimize" this way, why not shift them to this point?  Or why not move the root password input to that hub screen, rather than here?  This is not a big deal, I just find it incongruous.

Be that as it may, at this point the base system installation and configuration will take about 10-15 minutes.  During that time, you have to enter a root password.

Here I have clicked on the Root Password option in the preceding screen.  The installation to disk is still running, but the interface has moved to this screen to enter and verify the root password.  Once a password has been entered and confirmed, I click 'Done' to return to the installation status screen.

Back at the installation status screen, the Root Password entry is now satisfied, and there is nothing left to do but sit back and enjoy a cup of coffee until the installation is complete.

Installation is complete, and it is ready to reboot from the installed system. anaconda will not initiate the reboot for me, though. Click 'Done' to exit the installer, and you will be returned to the desktop of the Live system. I can then reboot as normal.

Please remember, in my experience with UEFI systems when rebooting it will not boot into Grub, or directly to Fedora, or whatever you have become accustomed to happening on the first boot. 

It will most likely just boot to Windows 8, as it always did before. You have to press the boot-selection key (ESC, F9, F12 or some such) to get a list of boot targets, and then select Fedora from that list.  Avoiding this "problem" (I consider it either a bug or a missing feature) is beyond the scope of this installation overview, I will write about that later - but soon.

Here is a gallery of screen shots, walking through how I installed the recently released openSuSE 12.3 on my new Acer Aspire One 725. This system came preloaded with Windows 8 (64-bit), UEFI Bios, Secure Boot enabled, and a GPT-partitioned disk.

My first step is to create some free space on the disk drive. Most of the major Linux installers are able to do this automatically if you let them, but I am a bit of a control freak (or a bit paranoid, depending on how you look at it), so I prefer to set up the disk exactly the way I want it in advance.

The most obvious way to free up some space is to reduce the size of the Windows C: partition. To do that, I could have used either the Windows Disk Management utility, or one of the Linux disk/partition manager programs such as gparted which I will show later as a typical example for Linux.

The Windows 8 Disk Management program can be reached through Control Panel / System and Security / Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions.

The display will be as shown above, but with the Windows C: partition filling all of the space between the EFI Boot partition and the Recovery partition.

It will then take just a few minutes to actually shrink the partition, and the display will end up looking like the one above.

The Linux gparted utility is one of the common alternatives for disk and partition management. It is included on a lot of Live CD/USB distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and openSuSE.

It can be found through the menus, generally under "Administration" or some such, or by typing it in the menu/application search box.

The display is shown above, with the Windows C: partition already reduced. If I had wanted to reduce the partition, I'd just select it in the list or graphic, and then click the Resize/Move button on the icon bar.

That will pop up a window where you can enter the new size. Once the disk layout looks like the one shown above, you are ready to install openSuSE (or any of the most popular Linux distributions), as the installer will automatically allocate the necessary partitions for swap, root and home.

However, as I mentioned previously, I am a bit of a control freak, and I prefer to create the Linux partitions manually. So I take one more step with gparted.

The openSuSE Live ISO image is UEFI and Secure Boot compatible, so I don't need to change anything in the system BIOS to boot it.

Depending on the boot device priorities on your system, you may need to press the Boot Select key (variously ESC, F9, F12 or whatever) and then select the CD/DVD/USB device containing the openSuSE Live image. The installation process can then be started by selecting the Install icon on the desktop.

The first screen in the installation process lets you select the default language and keyboard layout, and accept the license agreement.

The language selected here will be used during the installation, and will be the default language of the installed system.

The keyboard selection will take effect immediately so you will have the correct key definitions for the rest of the installation process. Additional languages and keyboard layouts can be selected after the installed system is running.

The next screen sets up the system clock. The time zone can be selected by first choosing the region and then the specific time zone from the drop-down lists, or by just clicking on the map. When the mouse cursor hovers on the map for a second or two, a pop-up shows its location.

Here you can also select how the hardware clock in the computer is kept – if dual-booting with Windows, the hardware clock will be kept in local time, but if you are running only Linux, you can select the check box to keep the clock in UTC.

The next screen is the initial suggestion for disk paritioning, automatically determined by the openSuSE installation process. I mentioned at the beginning that most Linux distributions will do this automatically; if I had not manually shrunk the Windows C: partition, the Linux installer would have done that at this point also. 

However, I have found that the installers are often overzealous in reducing Windows, leaving very little free space in the C: partition. This can, of course, be corrected at this point as well, but if I am going to have to monkey with the specific values anyway, I would rather just do it all in advance.

The installer will recognize the EFI Boot partition and set it to be mounted to the correct location, without reformatting. If there is a linux-swap partition already (as I created above), it will recognize and use that. 

It will create new partitions for the root file system and home file system. The root will be allocated a minimum size, and the rest of the free space on the disk will be allocated to the home file system.

If you don't want or need a separate home file system, just un-check that box and the suggested layout will be updated, home will be removed and the free space will be added to the root file system.

More advanced users cal select btrfs for the root and home file systems rather then ext4, and can choose to use LVM disk management rather than traditional partitions (both of these are beyond the scope of this brief overview). For many users the suggested layout will be acceptable, but control freaks can click Edit Partition Setup to adjust it.

This is the control-freak path, actually several steps from the previous screen shot.

First I un-checked the box for a separate home partition, then I clicked Edit Partition Setup to get into the Expert Partitioner.

I then deleted the root partition from the suggested layout, and put root on the 64GB partition I had created with gparted earlier.

The installer had already found and used the swap partition I had created, and the EFI Boot partition, so there was nothing else to do for those. 

Of course it is unusual to leave a huge unallocated area on the disk, but I will be installing other Linux distributions to this system, so I am leaving the space for that.

Wow, how scary does that sound? This screen is shown because we have been into the Expert Partitioner, and on exit it found that we are using a partition that is not going to be formatted. In this case that is not a problem, it is exactly what we want because the partition in question is the EFI Boot partition, and if we formatted it we would lose the Windows boot information. I click Yes and move on to the next step.

This is the confirmation of the partitioning layout. Note that the root partition is shown in red as a warning, because it is formatting an existing partition (the one which I created with gparted before starting the installer), and it shows /dev/sda2 being mounted to /boot/efi without being formatted. Oh, and you can also see here that I cleared the Separate Home Partition check-box.

Here you define the first user account. The most interesting bit of this screen is the “Automatic Login” check box. By default, openSuSE will boot directly to the desktop of the user defined here. Remove the check on this box if you want it to boot to a Login screen and enforce password controls.

This shows the one remaining "problem" with openSuSE installation on UEFI Boot systems. Booting will be done using "normal" Grub2, which is not what we want. This strikes me as a bit of a strange problem, since the installer has already seen, identified and configured the EFI Boot partition, but I suppose there is some technical reason that information is not being carried through to this screen. Click on the Booting header to get to the boot configuration screen and fix this.

This is the Boot Loader configuration screen. From the drop-down list, select GRUB2-EFI, then set the Enable Secure Boot check-box as appropriate for your needs.

Now the summary screen shows the correct boot loader configuration. Click Install.

One last confirmation that you really want to install... there's no going back after this.

The installation process takes about 10-15 minutes, and continuously updates this window to show what it is doing and how far along in the process it is.

When the installation is complete, you can reboot immediately, or go back the the Live system. When you reboot, you might be surprised to find that it still boots Windows, after all your hard work installing openSuSE. Welcome to the world of UEFI boot management.  You will need to interrupt the boot process by pressing whatever the Boot Select key is for your system (ESC, F9, F12, or something else). That will get you a list which in this case should include two items for openSuSE, with and without Secure Boot.

If you have Secure Boot enabled on your system, you have to choose the Secure Boot item (duh), if it is not enabled you can choose either one. Getting it to boot openSuSE by default, or let you select between Windows and openSuSE is a subject for another time.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 201303 says specifically in its release notes that it does not support EFI Boot or GPT disks.  It doesn't say exactly what the problems are, though, and the devil is in the details...

There are a number of ways to get around the EFI Boot problem, but none of them address the GPT partitioning problem:

• Most EFI/UEFI BIOS systems have configuration settings which allow you use 'Legacy Boot', which means booting from MBR-style boot records.
• LMDE, being a Debian derivative, can be configured with the 'grub-efi' package, to enable EFI Boot. Note that this can only be done after it has been installed, so it will almost certainly require the previous step, at least to get it to boot the installation media, because the LMDE Live media does not have EFI Boot capability.
• If you have another EFI-compatible Linux distribution already installed, and that distribution has a Grub which is able to boot other Linux distributions, you can set that up to boot LMDE. This works with openSuSE 12.3, but it doesn't work with Fedora 18, and I have not tried it with Ubuntu 13.04 yet.
• If you install another boot manager, such as rEFInd, you can set that up to boot LMDE.

However, none of these solves the GPT problem. Here's the lowdown on that.

Read this

A look at Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 201303

• Read more

The LMDE release notes specifically say that it does not support GPT partitioned disks. Unfortunately it doesn't say that they can't be read (they can), and it doesn't say what will happen if you try to install to one (it can be catastrophic).

What actually happens is that it interprets the GPT partition table incorrectly, and that causes it to get confused about what is where on the disk. In my case with LMDE, what it did was write the wrong partition information to the Grub configuration file, so it then tried to boot from the wrong partition, and it failed to boot. Not so catastrophic — it just didn't work.

However, a few weeks ago I tried to install PCLinuxOS (also based on Debian Testing, and also without GPT support), on another GPT-based system (my HP dm1-4310).  In that case the disk partitions were a bit more complicated, because I had left the Windows Recovery partition in place, which meant a lower-numbered partition was at the end of the disk. PCLOS interpreted the partition table incorrectly, and the results were much more damaging.

First, rather than use the existing swap partition, it wiped another existing Linux installation partition and used that for swap. Second, rather than installing to a new partition I had created for it, it wiped another (different) exiting Linux installation, and installed there. Not nice.

So, here is the summary. LMDE does not support EFI Boot out of the box, but there are ways to get around that. It also does not support GPT partition tables, and there is no way around this other than wiping the disk and changing it to DOS BIOS/MBR partitioning. I'm quite sure this is what Clem meant when he wrote in the FAQ "you could do it but it would require wiping the disk".  There is actually a slim chance that you could install successfully to a GPT disk, but that would require simple partitioning and a good bit of luck.

I hope this clears things up a bit. Feel free to post questions and comments, as always...

LMDE is a Linux Mint distribution, containing all of the nice Mint tools (installer, updater, menus and other utilities), plus lots of preloaded and preconfigured packages, but built on top of Debian GNU/Linux, rather than Ubuntu as the numbered/named Mint distributions (currently 14/Nadia).

The pros and cons of Debian

Read this

The never-ending saga of EFI Boot and GPT partitioning

• Read more

Specifically, it's built on the Testing Branch of Debian — currently the 'Wheezy' release (although probably not for much longer).  There are pros and cons to this - if you don't like Ubuntu, or you really prefer to start from a cleaner, more basic distribution, then being based on Debian is a big plus. 

On the down side, it means that it contains a lot of things which are well behind the latest current releases, starting from the Linux kernel itself — 3.2.0 rather than the 3.7.x or 3.8.x that other recent distributions feature — and the X Window System, 1.12.4 compared to 1.13.x, and so on. 

What this means is that you need to pay a bit more attention if you're going to try LMDE, make sure your hardware is compatible and supported, and be prepared to put in a bit more effort in getting everything installed, configured and running. The fact is that pretty much describes a typical Debian user anyway, so I don't see it as a big problem.

LMDE is a 'rolling release' distribution, so this release is a roll-up of the updates which have been made since the last set of ISO images was released, it is NOT a huge leap forward packed with a new kernel, new utilities, new applications and such. 

Update packs

In fact, LMDE is a bit of an exception even in the world of Linux rolling release distributions, because by default LMDE does not update continuously: instead, updates are collected into bundles, which are then released as 'update packs'. (This new release comes with update pack 6 included.)

The advantage here is that it reduces the chance that an update will have negative side effects and break something (or everything); the disadvantage is that it can seem like a long time between update packs.  So long, in fact, that for things which are commonly used and frequently updated, such as Firefox, separate patches are issued independent of the update packs.  (If you prefer a more typical rolling release model, you can use the LMDE "incoming" repositories.)

EFI boot

The release announcement for the 201303 build gives a good overview and summary of this release.  One thing that is important to note there is that it explicitly states that there is no EFI, GPT or secure boot support.  So if you have a UEFI system, you can only install LMDE via Legacy Boot, if your BIOS supports that option.  Even in that case, though, the other limitation is likely to bite you because as far as I know, the majority of EFI systems also have GPT partitioning (perhaps all?), so what is likely to happen is that you switch to Legacy Boot, install LMDE, it looks like the world is going to be a wonderful place, and when you try to reboot after installing it fails with a complaint about not being able to load the kernel.  Does this sound like the voice of experience talking to you?  Well, it is... the bottom line is, if you have an EFI boot system, and you do not have strong masochistic tendencies, you probably don't want to try to install LMDE on that particular system.

Of course, the other major thing that LMDE gives you is a choice of desktops.  There are ISO Live images for Cinnamon and MATE (with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of each of those).  I installed the Cinnamon version on most of my systems:

But on one of my netbooks (the Samsung N150-Plus), I installed the MATE version:

Other than the different desktops, the rest of the content of the two versions is the same.  Some of the highlights are:

• Linux Kernel 3.2.0
• Cinnamon 1.6 / MATE 1.4
• Firefox 19.0
• Thunderbird 17.0
• LibreOffice 3.5
• GIMP 2.8
• gThumb 3.0
• Image Magick 6.7
• Banshee Media Player 2.4
• Totem Movie Player 3.0

Another major advantage of LMDE is that it is 100 percent compatible with the Debian Testing repositories.  If there is something you want or need that is not included in the base distribution, your chances of finding it and being able to just download and install are very high.

Summary

So, to return to the opening paragraph, how do I summarise Linux Mint Debian Edition in general, and this release in particular? In rather loose terms, I would call LMDE a Linux devotee or hobbyist distribution.  As it says in the LMDE release notes, "LMDE requires a deeper knowledge and experience with Linux, dpkg and APT". 

If you're new to Linux and don't have that knowledge but would like to learn, LMDE is an excellent place to start — but don't expect it to be as complete, polished and user-friendly as the Linux Mint Ubuntu-based distributions. 

As for this release, if you already have LMDE running all you need to do is make sure that you have update pack 6 installed and it will be the same as this release - there is no need to reinstall this.  If you're installing a new system from scratch, though, you will definitely want to use these new ISO images.

When I bought my Acer Aspire One 522 a little over a year ago (November 2011, see original blog post here) I came very close to returning it because the screen resolution was only 1,024x600. But even in the first few hours of using and loading Linux on it, I was so impressed with it that I decided to keep it, and I've been pleased with it ever since.

Last week I saw an Aspire One 725 on sale here, for 399 Swiss francs (about 280), and the specifications said that it had the new AMD C-70 CPU (my AO522 has a C-60), more memory, and a larger disk. Now, these are some good reasons to get a new system!

I went to look at it and found that one of the major electronic shops here also happens to be offering a discount on all Acer laptops, so I ended up buying one for about 325 francs (just under 230). That's a heck of a good deal for what has turned out to be a heck of a good sub-notebook. (Note to Swiss readers: Tthe Acer discount is on offer until Sunday, 24 March) The specifications of the unit I bought are:

• AMD C-70 1GHz dual-core CPU

• 4GB DDR3 memory

• 500GB SATA disk

• Radeon HD 7290 graphic controller

• 11.6-inch 1,366x768 display

• Realtek 10/100 wired network adapter

• Broadcom 4313 wi-fi b/g/n adapter

• HDMI and VGA ports

• 1x USB 3.0, 2x USB 2.0 ports

• SD/MMC/xD/MemoryStick slot

Wow, that is very impressive, especially at that price. I can only see a few negatives:

1. No Bluetooth (I can live without it)

2. No gigabit wired network, only 10/100 (I seldom use wired anyway)

3. Preloaded with Windows 8 (sigh).

Be careful about these specifications and the price: There is another model of the Aspire One 725 also on sale here at a slightly lower price, with only 2GB of memory and a 320GB disk.

That might be sufficient for those who don't need quite so much memory and disk space, and with the 15 percent discount, that model is going to be under 300 francs. The different models are probably identified by the alphabet soup that follows the 725 model number, but deciphering that is beyond me; check the specs on the box carefully to be sure which you are getting.

When I unpacked it, I was immediately struck by the size and weight (small and light). I consider this to be in the same category as the HP Pavilion dm1-4310 (see my blog post about that model), and the difference is clear:

• Aspire One 725: 28.5x20.2x2.3cm, 1.2kg

• HP dm1-4310: 29.2x21.5x3.2cm, 1.6kg

That's a big difference, and when you are holding them both in your hands, you can really see it and feel it. Don't get me wrong, I still like the HP dm1 a lot, and it has a lot going for it. But if your criteria is size and weight, the AO725 is the clear winner. Oh, the AO725 also seems to run much cooler, as the cooling fan is on much less often than the HP dm1. Now obviously, the C70 CPU is much less powerful than the E2-1800 and thus produces less heat, so this isn't a surprise, but it is worth mentioning.

More pros and cons on the physical design and appearance: It is actually a bit nicer than the Aspire One 522. They have put a bit more effort into adding some shaping and curves around the edges and around the keyboard. It has a real touchpad with real buttons, not the dreaded "ClickPad" (which would have ruled it out for me anyway). The keyboard is probably the only thing I would complain about, the keys are absolutely flat and the feel is a bit mushy. The touchpad "buttons" are a single bar positioned on the front edge of the palm rest, which I don't much care for, but they seem to work reliably.

The variety of ports and interfaces on this unit is pretty impressive as well. First, it has an HDMI port, which I use when connecting to a television to show pictures, and a VGA plug. It has one USB 3.0 port and two USB 2.0 ports, which is becoming more important as more 3.0 devices are becoming available. It has a memory card slot which will take not only SD/xD/MMC cards, but also MemoryStick and MemoryStick Pro; this is a nice touch and still not all so common for notebooks in this class.

That's enough about the hardware, let's move on to the operating system. It came preloaded with Windows 8, which needed to be booted and configured — that took quite a long time slogging around, but eventually it finished.

Then I needed to make a rescue copy, because I am pretty likely to wipe Windows off this machine either intentionally, accidentally, or out of disgust.

The Acer Rescue Manager will make this backup to a USB stick, rather than DVD disks, which is nice. The sales clerk in the shop said that I needed at least a 16GB stick for this, and the Rescue Manager program said the same. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be large enough, because when I tried it with a 16GB stick, it ran until the progress bar got a fraction from the end &mash; and then just stopped. No message, no error, no crash, no stop, no nothing.

Then I tried with a 32GB stick, and that worked just fine. Sigh. Once Windows was loaded and configured, I went in to the disk/partition management program and told it to shrink its partition as much as possible. That gave me back about 230GB of the disk, which is more than enough for the moment. The disk has a GPT partition table, so it is not necessary to fiddle with "Extended Partitions" and "Logical Paritions", and I didn't have to worry that Windows and Acer had already "used up" the only four available "Primary" partitions. Nice.

The Aspire One 725 has a UEFI BIOS with Secure Boot enabled by default. There are a couple of Acer-specific things that are important to know here. First, the boot-select option is disabled by default, you have to go into the BIOS setup (press F2 during boot) and then change that to enabled before you can boot a Live USB stick.

Second, you can only disable Secure Boot if you have set a BIOS password. Yes, I really meant that — go back and read it again if you want, I'll wait. Grrr. Who does that make sense to? What is the logic there?

There is certainly nothing else in the BIOS, the BIOS help screens, or the documentation that came with it which says that this is the case. I was only lucky enough to know it because someone mentioned it in the comments in one of my previous posts about UEFI booting. So if you want to disable Secure Boot, you first have to define a BIOS password. Sigh.

Well, this might not be all that critical anyway because both openSuSE 12.3 and Fedora 18 have UEFI Secure Boot compatible Live images, so you can boot them without having to disable it.

That was what I did, booting and installing both of those, and it all worked without a hitch.

This was where things got really fun and interesting, both openSuSE and Fedora installed perfectly, including setting up UEFI Secure Boot on the new installations, and they both recognized, configured, and supported everything right out of the box.

Starting at the top with CPU frequency stepping, shown to be working with the lscpu command. I am happy with the FOSS Radeon drivers, so I didn't bother trying to load the proprietary AMD (fglrx) drivers. The wired and wireless network adapters work just fine, and it connected to my home wi-fi with no trouble. The Fn-keys for volume up/down/mute, brightness up/down/off, touchpad disable/enable, and even Sleep/Resume all work! Oh, and speaking of the touchpad, two-finger scrolling works.

Of course, it is also possible to install Linux distributions that do not yet have Secure Boot support, or even do not have EFI boot support.

One of the more popular in this category is Linux Mint 14, which I have also already installed. To do this, you have to change the BIOS from UEFI boot to Legacy boot, and then boot the Mint Live image. From that point on, installation is routine, and once again, everything works.

I did learn one other useful trick while installing and testing these three distributions.

The openSuSE Grub2-efi installation is actually able to boot not only openSuSE itself, but any other Linux installed, both EFI and legacy boot, and even Windows as well.

In my previous experimentation with UEFI and Secure Boot, I found that Fedora can't do that, so I had installed rEFInd to manage the boot selection. Now, though, I can configure the openSuSE grub.cfg to boot EFI images and "normal" linux kernel and initrd images, so it is possible to use it to manage the boot selection, and not have to bother installing rEFInd.

On top of that, rEFInd doesn't work with Secure Boot (well, it should according to the notes and description, but I haven't been able to figure it out), so by using grub2-efi this way, I can leave UEFI and Secure Boot enabled.

What else is there to say about the Aspire One 725? I think it is obvious how pleased I am with it. Compared to my netbook systems, the difference between a 10-inch display with 1,024x600 resolution and an 11.6-inch display with 1,366x768 resolution is huge.

Compared to my other sub-notebook, the difference in size and weight are also very significant.

The AO725 really seems to have hit the "sweet spot", and best of all, it is running every version of Linux that I load on it flawlessly. If it just had a keyboard with a bit of contour to the keys and better tactile feedback, it would be perfect.

The news is good - in fact, it's very good. 

I said when openSuSE 12.2 was released that I really liked it, and I feel even more strongly so now with 12.3. So strongly, in fact, that I already have 12.3 installed as the default boot on all of my computers. 

That covers a very wide range of hardware, with CPUs from Intel (Core2Duo, various Atom versions and Core i3/i5) and AMD (C50/C60/C70 and E350/E450); with memory from as little as 1GB to as much as 6GB, graphic controllers from Intel (965) and AMD (various Radeon models); Wi-Fi adapters from Broadcom, Atheros, Intel and Ralink; wired network adapters from Marvell, Broadcom, Realtek and Intel; Bluetooth adapters; audio controllers; and whatever else this variety of notebooks and netbooks have in them. 

I haven't had a single device that didn't work, and I didn't have to do any special adjustment, configuration, driver download, compiling or anything else.

A release recap

The release announcement gives a quick look at the highlights, and is well worth the couple of minutes it takes to read it.  The release notes give much more in-depth information about this release, including known bugs, quirks, limitations and workarounds for a few things.

Even if you're familiar with installing Linux in general or openSuSE in particular, it's worthwhile at least scanning through these notes. On the downloads page you can get either KDE or Gnome 3 Live ISO images, and a complete DVD Installer image.  Oh, and the Rescue image on that page is actually an Xfce Live image as well. 

If you prefer the cinnamon or MATE desktops, those can be added to the Gnome 3 version after installation, via the GUI add/remove software utility or directly from the CLI using zypper. 

The Live images are smaller and thus faster to download than the DVD image (Duh), and faster and easier to copy to a USB stick or burn to a disk, so if you don't specifically need something from the DVD I recommend using the live media. 

If you already have a running Linux system, you can dd the ISO image to a USB stick and be ready to install in just a couple of minutes.

Also, the DVD ISO is not a live image, it is only an installer, so you can't boot it to try out the operating system, and you can't jump out of the installation procedure and run some other program during installation.

The DVD image can also be used to upgrade and existing openSuSE installation, which the Live images can not do.

Installation is exceptionally easy - those who are unhappy with Fedora's latest anaconda installer might be happy with the openSuSE installer, as it is clear and easy to use, and doesn't try to do any of the fancy footwork that anaconda does (personally I like the new anaconda, but that's not important right now).

I was very surprised, pleased and impressed to find that the openSuSE installer handles UEFI, including Secure Boot, with no trouble at all, including detecting and mounting the EFI boot partition.

 There is one catch, though, which is mentioned in the release notes — even when it detects UEFI boot and gets the disk configuration right, when you get to the final summary screen it will have the wrong bootloader selected - it tries to install normal (non-EFI) Grub2.

You have to select the boot configuration item from the summary list and change that selection to grub2-efi.  This is also where you can specify that you want Secure Boot support.

Of course, if you are not installing on a UEFI BIOS system, you don't need to worry about any of this, the installation will be the same as it always has been. 

In either case, installation on all of my systems has taken less than 15 minutes. The first boot after the installation has completed will perform an 'automatic configuration', for which the Network Manager is disabled. If you're installing on a system with a wired network connection, you might not even notice the difference — but if you have wireless connection, you are likely to see that the Network Manager icon is missing from the panel, and even if you manage to find and click it there will be no wireless networks listed and it will inform you that Network Manager is not running.

No worries, don't panic, just reboot one more time and all will be well.

So, once you have it installed, what makes it so great that I was raving about it at the beginning of this post? 

What makes 12.3 a winner?

First, it works without any extra effort or special installation on all of the systems I have tried so far - every network adapter, every graphic controller, and every other device I've tried. 

This is in large part because it is running Linux kernel 3.7, and there has been a lot of activity over the past couple of kernel releases in keeping up with new device drivers. 

It also has the latest release of KDE (4.10); LibreOffice 3.6 including Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation and Database; Mozilla Firefox 19.0.2 and Konqueror 4.10 for web browsing; Amarok 2.7, GIMP 2.8.2  and digiKam 3.0. 

I'm particularly pleased with that last one, because I really like digiKam and I use it a lot, so I like to keep up with the latest versions. 

All of the kipi utilities are included for photo processing - one of my favorites in this group is hugin for stitching multiple images into a panorama.  Of course, there is a lot more included, even in the Live versions, but if one of your favorites isn't there, you can always add it after installation. 

I did this with kMyMoney, which I use quite a lot, and although the FOSS Radeon graphic display drivers work very well for ordinary use, I decided to try out the proprietary AMD Catalyst drivers as well. 

The openSuSE Wiki has a page about the AMD Catalyst package, with an overview of supported hardware, links and instructions for 1-click install, GUI/Yast install and command line/zypper install. I used 1-click install, and it worked perfectly and couldn't have been easier.

Another positive aspect of this release is that the laptop Fn-keys work on every system I have tried so far, too, at least for volume up/down/mute, brightness up/down and touchpad off/on. Wi-Fi off/on and Suspend/Sleep work on some systems but not on others, but that is typical of those keys anyway.  Multiple monitor support works well, just use the KDE Display control to set up the screens the way you want.

One last note, again about EFI Boot systems. The openSuSE 12.3 grub is capable of booting other operating systems, including Windows as well as other Linux distributions, either by directly loading their kernel or by chainloading their EFI boot image. 

This means that if you want a boot selection process that is more user-friendly than sitting pressing F-whatever over and over again, and better looking than a plain text list, you can substitute openSuSE for Windows in the initial boot sequence. Of course, I would still choose to install the wonderful rEFInd boot manager, but that's another issue.

Q: There seems to be quite a bit of variation in the actual implementation of UEFI boot, and in particular in the ease of (or sometimes possibility of) changing the configuration. Is this something you anticipated?  Does it concern you, and do you think it has contributed to a negative impression of UEFI boot, in some areas?

This is something we do talk about, yes. UEFI firmware is still relatively new to many end users. We believe that with more experience in the marketplace, UEFI implementations will strike the optimal balance of uniformity and innovation.

Creating conditions that promote richness in the offerings of member companies is the Forum's prime consideration. Ultimately, this leads to more choices and innovations. The UEFI Forum has chosen to focus on defining mechanisms that represent interoperability interfaces and, whenever possible, to avoid discussion of policy choices about how to implement or consume the interfaces that make up the interoperability surface.

We recognize that this is somewhat of a double-edged sword. On one hand, this allows implementers of the standards the flexibility to examine the needs in the markets they serve, as well as to respond with implementation choices from the standards that best match their customers’ needs. On the other hand, focus on mechanism leaves room for different policy choices among different platforms and operating systems, which creates a variety of combinations and variations in presentation.

Q: Most UEFI boot implementations include optional "Legacy Boot" support. What are the implications of activating this? Does it actually disable a significant part of the UEFI BIOS functionality?

MD: Yes. Enabling Legacy Boot does disable the UEFI Secure Boot feature, as well as the UEFI runtime functions.  However, this feature is required in some systems, in order to enable use of older operating system versions that lack UEFI capability, as well as older expansion cards that lack UEFI Option ROM drivers. Generally, enabling Legacy support on a system that has been tuned to boot fast with that support disabled will lead to longer boot and resume times.

Q: The user interface for changing the UEFI boot configuration on most systems today has had mixed reviews. Are there any plans or discussions to produce a standard UEFI configuration editor, or even a standard UEFI multi-boot control program?

Configuration editors and/or multi-boot programs fall into the category of policy engines for the platform. This is where determinations are made about how various boot elements are controlled. Today, these things typically fall outside the scope of the UEFI Forum specifications.

The possibility for de facto standards to emerge for these components certainly exists. It seems likely that market feedback will help guide vendors towards improved solutions for these problems. Efforts are being made in various open source venues.

Q: Are you familiar with "rEFInd" utility for EFI multi-boot control?  What is your opinion of this program in particular, and this type of program in general?

MD: Yes. UEFI specifications make a number of pre-boot utilities possible. However, on a system with UEFI Secure Boot enabled, the binary of any utility must be signed by a trusted signing authority. Projects like this that might go the extra mile to produce a signed binary could make it easier for ordinary users to take advantage of their work on a broader range of systems.

- openSuSE 12.3

- Linux Mint Debian Edition 201303

- Debian 7.0 (Wheezy)

- Korora 18

- Mageia 3

- Ubuntu 13.04

I will be posting details about each of these when they are released — installation, configuration and contents.  For now, here's a very brief look at what's on the way, and how the development cycle has been going.

I have been following the openSuSE 12.3 development since milestone 0, and it's been an interesting ride.  It is currently available as RC2, with the final release scheduled for Wednesday 13 March.  Compared to the development of 12.2 it has been very smooth, with steady progress, no major crises or resets, and more or less on schedule. RC2 even includes UEFI boot (including Secure Boot) compatibility, which took me by surprise. I have this installed on all of my laptops and netbooks, and it's working extremely well on all of them.  As is usual with openSuSE, there are KDE and Gnome Live ISO images as well as a massive (4.7GB) DVD installer.

A new 'rollup' release of Linux Mint Debian Edition with Update Pack 6 included will soon be available. It is currently available as a Release Candidate (RC), in Cinnamon and MATE desktop versions. No formal release date has been announced, but as the RC has been out since about 20 February, it probably won't be long now.

Debian seems like the epitome of the 'We will make no release before its time' distributions — the exact opposite of the Ubuntu 'new release every six months, come hell or high water' philosophy. The Release Candidate for the Debian 7.0 installer is currently available, which means it won't be too long until the final release. My personal opinion is that the development of Wheezy has been a bit smoother than the previous couple of releases, but that may only be due to the fact that I wasn't paying all that much attention as it went along.

Ubuntu. My, how perceptions have changed over the past couple of years. In my opinion it is now such a polarizing release — almost everyone I know has very strong feelings about it, one way or the other. Some are convinced that it will be the saviour of the Linux world, and some feel just as strongly that it's the worst thing happening to Linux today. But I don't know many who just say "Whatever. It's ok, I'm not bothered either way." The next release of Ubuntu — 13.04, known as Raring Ringtail — is due out on 25 April. The Beta release is due next week (14 March), but of course Daily Builds are available for those who are very anxious, very curious and/or very brave.

I think of Korora as being derived from Fedora in much the same way that Linux Mint is derived from Ubuntu. They start from a very good distribution, and then they add all the things that I would put in myself, and they end up with a great distribution. The Beta release is currently available, but as far as I know no final release date has been set yet. At the same time, there has been a name change (dropping the second "a" from Kororaa) and a web page change (to www.kororaproject.com), so make sure you look in the right place for this one.

Mageia 3 has had a couple of significant bumps in the road during its development, resulting in a bit of a delay in the final release and at least one extra Beta release so far. However, it's looking good now. Beta 3 was released on Sunday 10 March, and I have already installed it on several systems with excellent results.

The strength of PCLinuxOS today is in stability, and a very active and dedicated user community.

It includes an excellent array of applications and utilities in the base distribution, so for many purposes it is ready to use right out of the box.  If you try it and have problems of any kind, you can generally get very capable help from the PCLinuxOS User Forums very quickly.

PCLinuxOS is supposed to be a "rolling release", with continuous updates and quarterly roll-ups into fresh ISO images to make scratch installation easier. However, the last ISO release that I was aware of was 2012.08, so unless I missed something I would say this is not exactly "quarterly".

The Release Announcement gives a good overview of this release.  It seems that the two most significant updates are to Linux kernel 3.2.18 and KDE 4.9.5.  Of course, the biggest advantage of this release is for new installations, because after installing from the Live media, there are only a handful of updates to install, rather than the very large number of updates which had accumulated since the list ISO distribution.

After having installed (or at least tried to install) on most of my computers, I have a short list of comments and warnings:

- Compared to distributions like Fedora, openSuSE, Ubuntu and Mint, the Linux kernel is a number of point-releases old (most of those are currently on at least 3.5.x, and the newest stable kernel available is 3.8.x).  This is significant if you have a very new computer, especially a very new laptop, because there may well be hardware which is not yet supported by the 3.2.x kernel. The Ralink 3290 WiFI card in my HP Pavilion dm1-4310 was not supported, for example.

- The PCLinuxOS installer still creates an X11 config file (for graphic support) on the fly during installation, and it still doesn't get it right sometimes. The usual symptom of this is that your display come up at the wrong resolution (a couple of my 1366x768 laptops came up at 1024x768 or 800x600, for example). The simple solution is to just delete or rename the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf - the X window server has been capable of figuring out the graphic configuration on the the fly for quite some time now.  

If you have one of the more difficult graphic cards which require a special configuration file, you can fix this up after the installation is complete.

- PCLinuxOS doesn't seem to have provisions for UEFI-boot systems.

- The biggest problem I had was that the PCLinuxOS installer seemed to get confused by the gpt partition table on my new HP dm1-4310.  It didn't complain or warn me about it, but when I ran the installation it put both the root and swap areas on the wrong partitions. I tried this twice to be sure that I hadn't done something wrong, but it came out exactly the same way both times.

- On one system, where I am using openSuSE 12.3 with Grub 2 for booting, it would not boot PCLinuxOS after installation completed, it suffered a hard crash every time it tried.  

This was using a grub.cfg file which had been recreated (grub2.mkconfig) after the PCLinuxOS installation completed, and I cross-checked the boot options between that and the legacy Grub config file PCLinuxOS had created for itself. When I changed the Grub 2 config file to make it simply chainload the PCLinuxOS legacy grub, that worked.

- There are only 32-bit versions available at this time. These obviously can be used on 64-bit systems: I assume that 64-bit images are likely to follow before too long, as they have in the past, but there are no promises from PCLinuxOS developers on this.

- Finally, speaking of Grub, PCLinuxOS still installs with legacy Grub by default, they are one of the very few who have not switched to Grub 2. I consider this to be a plus for PCLinuxOS, but others might not see it that way.

During that time I have slowly (much too slowly) learned a lot about booting UEFI systems. Thanks to some very helpful comments and advice from Adam Williamson at Fedora, some excellent documents written by Roderick W Smith, a lot of trial and error, and rebooting-adjusting-testing-rebooting ad infinitum (or more accurately ad nauseum), I'm finally starting to make some progress.

Note: I am going to ignore the issue of Secure Boot here. I don't want to talk about it, it is not relevant to this discussion, so if you really feel compelled to start yet another flame war about it, well, feel free to do so but I will ignore those comments.

Warning: The following description is very compressed; if you need to really understand this, you will have to dig out a lot more detail elsewhere. My concern here is with the mechanics, not the theory. Or, put another way, I don't really feel like I fully understand everything I know about this yet. It is extremely important to keep in mind that changing the configuration of the boot manager and/or boot loader on your computer can very easily render it unbootable. So if you are going to try this, the usual advice about "make sure you have good backups" is not even enough. I would advise only trying this on a system where you don't mind having to wipe it out completely and reload from scratch. I have done that several times during this process, and now that I have the SSD loaded and configured to the point that I don't really want to lose it all again, when I decide to try something completely new or particularly risky, I swap out the SSD for an old SATA drive first. After making whatever tests, if I have learned something useful I swap the SSD back in again and apply it to that. As a result of this I am very appreciative of how easy it is to swap the disk drive in the dm1-4310. Thanks very much for that, HP.

OK. Concentrate on mechanics, don't wander off into theory or philosophy. That is the mantra. Here we go.

Multi-boot

With traditional BIOS systems (most people will think of this as pre-Windows 8 systems, although this is not really true; EFI BIOS systems have been slowly increasing), when you bought a PC preloaded with Windows, it booted Windows. Duh.

If you tried hard enough, and you learned about either BCDedit or easyBCD, you could configure it to multi-boot, giving you a list of available operating systems to choose from. If you installed Linux, you typically replaced the Windows bootloader with either Grub or Lilo, which preformed pretty much the same function, presenting a list of available operating systems to choose from. This all happened more or less "automatically;" when you installed Linux it set up and configured Grub for you, and when you rebooted after installation you got a list showing Linux and Windows to choose from.

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When I tried doing exactly the same thing on this system with UEFI BIOS, the Linux installation worked just fine...but when I rebooted, it still just started Windows. No multi-boot, no menu, no indication that anything else had been changed; it just booted exactly the same way that it had originally. I then found that I could press the hot key for "boot selection" or "operating system selection" (usually F9 on HP, ESC on Samsung, F12 on Acer and Fujitsu), and I would get a list where I could choose to boot either Windows or Linux.

At least this worked, but it had several serious disadvantages. First, I couldn't find a way to get it to boot to this menu by default; I had to press the hot key, and I had to do it quickly. If I was too slow, it booted Windows and I had to reboot and try again. Second, the presentation of the list is very simple, to be charitable. Ugly is a better description of it. Third, the list contained a lot of stuff that was irrelevant to me, so I had to figure out by trial and error, and then remember, what was "real" and what wasn't. At this point I could at least get either Linux or Windows booted, but this was clearly not an acceptable situation.

At this point I have to say that there seems to be a lot of difference in the flexibility, configurability, and general support of UEFI BIOS implementations between manufacturers. I have only tried this on one HP system so far, and based on my experience and what I have heard from other people with other systems, I believe/hope/wish/assume that this is a particularly difficult one to deal with, it can/should be considerably easier on some others. Jumping forward, based on what I know now, I can say that the problem at this point was that the boot manager was still pointing to the Windows bootloader. What I was doing by pressing F9 was interrupting the boot manager, and getting it to show me the list of what it knew about. If I could have changed the boot manager configuration so that it started the UEFI Grub bootloader, it would then have been more like I expected after installing Linux on a traditional BIOS system. But I didn't know that, and even now that I do know it, I can't find a way to change that on this HP system. Read on...

OK, so I figured that if the HP wasn't going to let me boot Grub, I would try to live with the Windows bootloader. Ugh. I searched for information online, I used BCDedit first, and then easyBCD, to read and modify the boot list. At this point I noticed that the list it was showing was not the same as the list presented when I interrupted the boot process with F9, but I still didn't understand the significance of that. Although I managed to add entries to the boot list, and the Windows bootloader would then present a list to choose from, I could never get it to actually boot anything from that list other than Windows 8. I still don't know what I was doing wrong, or how/what/where should be added to that list, but I finally gave up. I assumed that I was stuck with the sub-optimal F9 boot selection procedure.

A light goes on

Then I learned about the Linux efibootmgr utility. It would give me a list of the boot manager configuration--and I saw that this was different from the list that the Windows programs were showing me. This was where the light finally started to come on. Most importantly for me at this stage, I saw that the list included entries for the Linux EFI systems I had installed! Hooray! In fact, this list actually did correspond to what the boot manager showed when I pressed F9, so I figured if I could change it somehow, I might get where I wanted to be.

Unfortunately, I couldn't change it very much--in fact, at first nothing that I did worked at all. I couldn't change the boot order, I couldn't change the path of the default boot item, and I couldn't even delete an item from the list. All of these things seemed to work when I tried them and then checked the list again right away, but then I would reboot, and everything went back to the way it was before.

There were several times during this that my HP almost became a UFO. Finally, when I was desperately changing pretty much anything and everything I could, just to see if I might stumble across something, I did...I found that I could set the "Next Boot" item to one of the Linux Grub entries, and sure enough, when I rebooted it would boot Grub. Hooray again! There is some tiny glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel! But not much, unfortunately. No matter what else I tried, I couldn't permanently change it to boot Grub. Grr.

Enter rEFind

Then I came across the rEFInd program. The documentation looked good, and gave me a lot more information about what was really happening and why during the EFI boot process. I already had Fedora 18 installed, so I went to Sourceforge and downloaded the refind.rpm package, installed that and crossed my fingers...

At this point, the windows of my house were starting to look like very inviting launching points for this computer.

Rebooted...and still got nothing but Windows. At this point, the windows of my house were starting to look like very inviting launching points for this computer...sigh.

The rEFInd documentation mentions that some systems, particularly HP systems, don't allow the boot manager configuration to be changed to anything other than the default bootmgfw.efi program. Well, I learned long ago that when faced with such inflexibility, the simple solution is to just give it what it wants--and the rEFInd documentation suggests about the same thing.

Move the EFI/Microsoft/Boot directory out of the way (rename it), move the refind directory to that name, and rename refind.efi to bootmgfw.efi. Cross fingers, cross toes, touch wood, do several superstitious dances around the chair and desk, then reboot, and... yes! Yes! It boots rEFInd! Hooray! Whee! Whoopie!!!! At this point my partner was shaking her head, and thinking that I have taken leave of what little sense I had left.

The rEFInd boot screen is pretty nice. It is very clever about finding whatever might be bootable on your disk, and it presents a list of graphic buttons you can click to choose what you want to boot. It even makes a good effort at figuring out exactly what things are, and shows appropriate graphics on the buttons when it can.

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So on my system, the Windows, Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSuSE logos were there along with a number of other Linux "penguin" logos, and some generic "unknown" items. Selecting one of the Linux icons would boot Grub from that distribution, and selecting the Windows icon booted Windows 8. Oh. Uh oh. Wait a minute...

After booting Windows 8, the next time I rebooted I was back to the same old Windows-only boot. When I went back and checked the EFI partition, I was amazed to find that the Boot directory I had set up with refind in it was gone, and the original Windows boot setup was there again!!!! Apparently there is something in the Windows boot processing that checks this, and if it finds changes that it doesn't like, it restores everything from a backup copy.

I'm assuming this is an HP-specific trick, because the backup copy appears to be under EFI/HP/Boot, but I'm not sure, and I suppose other manufacturers could do it too. Perhaps it is even "required" for Windows 8 certification; who knows?

Anyway, my next attempt was to leave the contents of EFI/Microsoft/Boot intact as far as possible, and just copy/rename the refind stuff in there as well. There are no name conflicts between the contents of the two directories, so this isn't difficult, and the only thing I had to rename was bootmgfx.efi itself. Once that was done, it was back to booting rEFInd again, and this time when I booted Windows, it left everything intact, so subsequent boots still went to rEFInd. Finally. I would celebrate again at this point, but I was just too tired. I have since booted numerous times, and this seems to be stable.

At this point I realized that rEFInd itself was not the key to what I had accomplished. The information I got from its documentation, and from running it and seeing how it worked and how it was configured, led me to the point where I could create a working alternative to the original Windows boot manager/boot loader setup. But that alternative is not unique to rEFInd; I can just as well copy one of the grubx64.efi programs and rename it to bootmgfw.efi, make sure the associated grub.cfg file is in the same directory, and it will happily boot into Grub.

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The difference is, rEFInd will automatically find and successfully boot just about anything and everything possible on the disk, but the EFI Grub programs that are included with Fedora and Ubuntu are not as flexible. In fact, I have only been able to get the Fedora version to boot Fedora itself, even though grub2-config finds other operating systems and adds them to the grub.cfg file, attempting to boot them fails. Adam Williamson told me this is "by design," because selecting other operating systems to boot should be handled by the boot manager, not by Grub, so that's fine by me. The Ubuntu version is more successful; I can boot other Linux distributions including those that do not have their own EFI boot capability, but I haven't been able to boot Windows from it.

Besides, rEFInd itself really is a beauty, and it works exceptionally well. As I said, in the simplest case all you have to do is install it and get it to boot (OK, that might not be terribly simple, but it is the necessary first step), and then it will automatically find, list, and boot just about anything you have on the disk. This includes Linux distributions both with and without EFI boot capability and various versions of Windows.

If anything, it can be somewhat over-aggressive, giving you lots of duplicate icons for the same Linux installation, because it will find and list the EFI shim and EFI grub files plus however many Linux images you have in the /boot directories of the disk partitions. If that is not enough (or more likely is too much), you can customize the refind.conf file to limit where it looks and/or what it looks for, or you can even go so far as to disable searching entirely and create a manual configuration.

Looking back, with the knowledge that I have now from going through this whole process, I can see that setting up dual-boot Windows and Linux system could have, and probably should have, been a lot easier if one or more of the following had happened:

• If it had been possible to permanently change the default boot loader: I'm pretty sure that Fedora and/or Ubuntu tried to do this when they were installed, so that after installation I would have gotten Grub instead of Windows. Likewise, I tried to do this myself, albeit fairly late in the process, and it didn't work

• If I had been able to figure out how to add another item to the Windows boot loader menu, either manually or with easyBCD, I would have "settled" for that, and at least I would have had something that worked

• If HP, Microsoft, or whoever else got involved, didn't suddenly detect that something had changed on the EFI boot partition and decide that no one could possibly want to boot anything other than Windows, so they just wiped everything that had been done up to that point and restored the original EFI boot configuration.

Some of these things may be handled "better" or "correctly," or at least in a more "user-friendly" way on other systems, with other EFI BIOS implementations and other boot sequences.

In my opinion the long-term solution for this is going to have to be a lot more automation, with the Linux installer figuring out what needs to be done to get some kind of flexible boot manager installed and configured, whether it be rEFInd, Grub, eLilo, or whatever.

But that isn't going to happen anytime soon, I suspect, and before it can happen there is going to have to be a lot more progress made in the configurability of the EFI boot process, and the standardisation or at least conformity of changing that configuration. As things are today, it is a royal pain in the rear when one kind of computer does it one way, another does it differently, and some don't allow much changing at all.

As I said at the beginning, I still feel like I don't understand everything I know about this very well. Anyone who can add more constructive information and experience, please do so in the comments. I am posting this despite my misgivings about lack of understanding in hopes of providing useful information to others who are struggling with the same thing, so more information is always welcome.

For those who are disgusted, fed up, or otherwise disenchanted with the Gnome 3 desktop, Cinnamon gives you a much more traditional look, with a bottom panel, controls, icons and applets in the style of Gnome 2, but with Gnome 3 still 'under the hood'. It also includes the Nemo file manager, which is a fork of Nautilus that retains the functionality of Nautilus 3.4. The Introducing Nemo web page contains a lot of good information about why and how Nemo was created, and outlines its features, advantages and future.

In addition to the well-known Gnome and KDE distributions, Fedora also has a popular Xfce distribution. The Fedora 18 release uses Xfce4 version 4.10. Xfce has gained considerable popularity recently because it's seen as a good alternative for users who don't want Gnome 3, but still want a more or less traditional 'Gnome-style' desktop. This probably doesn't do it justice, though, because it's a very good and very capable desktop in its own right. For a quick overview of features, take the Xfce 4.10 Tour.

The difference between this Xfce 'spin' and one of the alternative Gnome desktops that I mentioned previously (Cinnamon and MATE) is that those are alternative interfaces built on top of the Fedora Gnome distribution. They thus will have all the same utilities and applications, but will provide you with a different (and hopefully more comfortable) way of working with them. The Xfce spin is a completely different distribution, with a very different set of utilities and applications. Most of the utilities are developed specifically for Xfce (or even by the same development team), and thus are designed to fit well with the Xfce desktop, and follow the 'fast and light' philosophy.

• midori browser, in addition to the latest Firefox release.
• Thunar file manager (which is also winning a lot of admirers because of the recent Nautilus changes)
• ristretto image viewer
• parole media player

The applications are also chosen with more emphasis on "fast and light", and this philosophy will extend not only to the applications which are included, but also to the choice not to include certain types of applications.

• Abiword for word processing, rather than a full Office Suite
• No GiMP or other major image editing program
• Simple audio/media players

The screenshot above shows the Xfce desktop as I typically modify it for use on my netbooks. Rather than top and bottom panels, I have moved one panel to the side, with only icons and symbols (no text) on it, and I have the other panel at the bottom. Both panels are set to auto-hide, so I get the maximum usable screen space on the netbook.

Fedora 18 still uses Network Manager, rather than wicd which is frequently chosen for Xfce distributions. To me the advantage of this is that I don't have to learn another network manager, and I already know that it works not only with all of the various wired and wireless network adapters on my systems, but it also works with my Huawei 3G wireless broadband USB stick.

Another alternative in the Fedora distribution family is LXDE, which is even further on the 'fast and light' scale than Xfce. In this case the philosophy is even included in the name: The Lightweight X Desktop Environment. As with Xfce, this is reflected in both the utilities and applications included in the distribution. The following is a short list, for a more complete list and information, check the about LXDE webpage:

• PCManFM (file manager)
• GPicView (image viewer)
• Abiword (word processor)
• Gnumeric (spreadsheet)
• LXMusic (audio player)
• GXine (video player).
• Firefox (browser)

I hadn't really given it much thought, but looking at that list, in some ways LXDE looks like it is actually a more complete 'out of the box' distribution than Xfce, notably with the spreadsheet and video player included. I also find that they have a few panel applets which are quite interesting, for example a cpufreq monitor for displaying CPU speed throttling information. But they haven't lost their focus on light and fast, because you get the feeling of speed everywhere you turn. Windows open and programs start very fast, and even the auto-hide function of the panel is very snappy in moving up and down.

By the way, here's a tip for LXDE users. After scratching my head and searching the web for quite a long time trying to find a way to get a screenshot, I stumbled across the very handy Action in mtPaint (which is included in F18 LXDE): just start the program from Menu/Graphics/mtPaint, then go to File/Actions/Time Delayed Screen Shot.  Very handy, and a lot easier than anything else I've found.

I would like to add a few more words about anaconda. In my previous post about Fedora 18, I tried to include some tips specifically about the disk and partition allocation operations, because I felt I got rather lost in that part and thought others might need help.

I've been rather blunt in my comments and criticism of anaconda, both here in my own blog and in comments I've posted elsewhere. But on reflection, I think it's important to remember that writing a program like anaconda is a huge task: it's extremely complex and absolutely full of variations, different paths to the final goal (installing Linux), tons of minute details, every one of which has got to be exactly right. And the complexity is increasing, not decreasing. Get anything wrong, often even in the smallest detail, and you end up with a failed install — or even worse, with an unbootable or even wiped disk or an otherwise unusable system. I have never worked on or contributed to anaconda (other than flippant criticism), but from having been on other such projects I can tell you that you seldom hear about how well you have done, but you always hear (generally at high volume) when something goes wrong.

So I want to say right here and now, loud and clear, WOW. What a good job. For this to be the first release of a complete redesign and rewrite of anaconda, and for it to be this solid, is extremely impressive. Those of us who know Fedora will know that this is not the 'last' version, it isn't 'cast in concrete', it's going to continue to develop and improve, and future releases will be even better. But this first release works, and works quite well.

For this to be the first release of a complete redesign and rewrite of anaconda, and for it to be this solid, is extremely impressive

I have specifically mentioned the disk partitioning section as being confusing. But when I think about it, what's not confusing about disk partitioning? If you take the 'do this for me' approach, which of course is offered by anaconda, it will work. I think someone commented previously that it would produce two partitions, and I'm not convinced that's correct because I believe it will make at least root, home, boot and swap partitions — and if you are installing on a UEFI system, it will also make a /boot/efi partition. But that's all fine, it works, and if you don't want that many partitions you can set it up manually and get it down to two (or three for UEFI).

If you want to understand how all of this works, as Adam Williamson has kindly pointed out that there's help in anaconda itself, an overview in the Fedora 18 Release Notes, more information in the Fedora 18 Installation Guide, and even more in the anaconda documentation; there are also blogs and chats that follow it. The new anaconda presents the disk layout in a completely new way, with partitions grouped by logical installations, and that certainly confused me at first. I'm accustomed to the gparted presentation, which is nothing more than a graphical depiction of the physical layout of the drive, and that in itself assumes that you know enough to understand what each partition is and how they fit together. That isn't a very good assumption for the average user, is it? Showing partitions in logical installation groups may well be a better idea, and I just need to adjust to it.

So, before ranting and raving about anaconda being different (not only from previous anaconda releases, but really significantly different from just about any other Linux installer out there), stop and think. Look for help, open your mind and try to see what it is trying to tell you. You might be surprised. I was.

jw

Oyou'll still have it after rebooting.

No one can accuse the Fedora developers of being slaves to a calendar, or succumbing to pressure to ship a release before they believe it is really ready. 

According to their public statements, the primary causes of the multiple delays were a rewrite of the anaconda installer and a new utility called fedup, which is a new Fedora upgrade utility. 

With the arrival of fedup, all upgrade functionality has been removed from anaconda as well, which should make it considerably smaller and less complicated. I will include some notes and screen shots of the new anaconda later in this post.

One of the major new features in this release is support for UEFI Secure Boot. 

I have installed this release on UEFI systems, with Secure Boot enabled and disabled, and on traditional BIOS systems as well, all with no problems. 

My previous two blog posts discuss some of the issues of UEFI and Secure Boot installation, so I will not go into more detail on that here. 

I have installed this release on pretty much every laptop, sub-laptop, netbook and desktop system I have around here, and had no trouble with any of them. All of the hardware was detected and supported out of the box, with no additional searching, compiling, downloading, installing or other special actions required. 

That includes CPUs, graphic controllers with VGA, DVI, HDMI and laptop display connection (including the dual-display setup I have on my desk - Fedora is the only distribution I use that recognizes and configures dual monitors automatically), wired and wireless network controllers, audio input and output, and whatever else is around here.

A few other highlights of this release:

• Linux kernel 3.6.11 - This means it has a lot of new device drivers and hardware support.  For example, this is one of the very few current Linux distributions which supports the Ralink 3290 WiFi adapter in my HP Pavilion dm1-4310 out of the box.
• X.org X Server 1.13.1 - Supports my various Intel and AMD/ATI Radeon graphic adapters with the FOSS radeon driver. I don't currently have anything with a nVidia adapter, so I can't comment on support for that.
• Gnome 3.6.2
• Firefox 18.0 - Keeping up with Firefox releases is not exactly easy any more. In fact, you have to install the latest updates after completing the base installation to get up to 18.0.
• LibreOffice 3.6.3.2 - Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress all included
• Shotwell 0.13.1 - Photo management
• Rhythmbox 2.98 - Audio player
• Totem 3.6.3 - Gnome movie player

As is normal with the Fedora distribution, there is no non-FOSS software included. The most notable example of this is that there is no Adobe Flash player included. An explanation of this, and instructions for downloading and installing the Adobe Flash Player for Fedora are on the Flash - Fedora Project web page.

New in this release, Fedora includes support for the MATE desktop. For those who are not fond of Gnome 3, MATE offers a traditional Gnome 2-style desktop, with upper and/or lower panels, menus, desktop icons and a variety of associated applications. 

MATE is not included in the base distribution, to get it you have to run the command "yum install @mate" (as root, of course). It would be nice if there were a meta-target in the Software Install utility, but if there is, I haven't figured it out yet.

After installing MATE, the next time you log in you will see a new "Session..." button on the password entry screen.  Click that, and you can choose between the Gnome and MATE desktops. MATE has come a long way, and for my purposes I can no longer distinguish between it and the actual Gnome 2 desktop.

Fedora also offers a KDE (version 4.9.4) distribution. This is not just a KDE desktop built on top of the Gnome distribution, it is a separate distribution built with KDE utilities and applications. Some of the notable differences:

• Konqueror browser (instead of Firefox)
• Calligra Words, Sheet and Stage (instead of LibreOffice)
• Gwenview (instead of Eye of Gnome)
• digiKam (optional, instead of Shotwell)
• Amarok audio player (instead of Rhythmbox)
• Dragon Player (instead of Totem)

Of course, if you prefer Firefox, LibreOffice or whatever, you can still go to the Software Management utility, search and select the version you prefer, and install it on Fedora KDE. There are a variety of other application differences, and of course all of the standard utilities such as the file manager, CD/DVD disk burner are KDE-specific rather than their Gnome equivalents.

I can't let a new release with KDE go by without plugging my favorite netbook desktop - KDE netbook. 

This is included in the standard KDE distribution, all you have to do is select it in "System Settings/Workspace Behavior". It changes the desktop into the multi-sectioned layout shown above, with a top panel (which auto-hides when an application is started), a quick launch area, a search bar, and an application/utility menu area. It just keeps getting better with every new KDE release.

This is the initial view of the anaconda installation summary screen. 

What is important here is the Storage Installation Destination, click that to select the disks and partitions where Fedora is to be installed. You can also change the timezone and keyboard layout if necessary - but note that changing the keyboard here has no affect on the installation process itself. 

If you want to change the keyboard layout for that, you have to use the normal tools - go to the application menu and type Language, then select the Region and Language utility program, and use the Input Sources tab to select a new layout.

After clicking Storage Installation Destination and then selecting the disk you want to install on, you will get this screen with installation options. 

The exact content of the upper part of the window will depend on how your disk is partitioned and how much free space you have. In the lower portion of the window you will find a Partition Scheme Configuration drop-down.  Fedora uses lvm disk management by default, if you want to use standard partitions you have to click this drop-down and select that option.

If you want to specify the partition layout yourself, you have to click the I don't need help box. anaconda will then not try to figure out a partition layour for you, when you click Reclaim space it will simply take you to the next screen where you can do it all yourself. I found this a bit scary, I didn't want it to reclaim space, I want to tell it myself which existing partition to reuse, but you have to click that button to go on.

This is the initial view of the existing disk partition layout. 

Don't be confused or intimidated by my rather large number of partitions, a more typical one will probably have something like one to four partitions, depending on what is already installed. 

If you want to reuse an existing partition, click the drop-down for that installation in the list. Then select the partition you want to reuse, and its details will be shown at the right side of the window. 

In the Mount Point input box, enter what you want to use this partition for (it is / in this case). You must also click the drop-down for Customize... and then click the Reformat box, and then click Apply Changes.

After applying the changes in the previous screen, click the drop-down beside New Fedora 18 Installation and you should see the root partition that you are reusing. 

If there is a swap partition on the disk, it will be picked up for this installation automatically at this point. Click Finish Partitioning to commit the changes and return to the installation summary.

If you are installing on a UEFI system, it will require a special EFI Boot partition. 

If you already have another operating system installed (Windows 8 or some UEFI-capable Linux), you can figure out which partition is already used for EFI boot, and then manually reuse that one by marking it for mount on /boot/efi in the new Fedora installation. 

Important: do NOT mark the Reformat box for this file system. Of course, if you don't want to reuse the existing partition, or you don't want to bother figuring out which one it is, you can just make a new partition for this, or just let Fedora make the partitions itself automatically.

An important note - when you return to this screen after completing disk partitioning, it will initially still say "Please complete required items...".  It takes a short time (5-15 seconds) for anaconda to process and check the changes, then if everything is all right it will remove that message and the Begin Installation button will become active.

The results have been mixed: I have learned a bit and been frustrated a lot. 

What I intend to present here is a summary of what I have learned so far. I know that there has been a lot of information and discussion of EFI and Secure Boot in the Linux community, but it seems to me that most of it has been speculation and opinion based on reading the public statements and information available, and very little of it has been from people who actually have such a system and have tried to set it up with Linux and/or Windows. 

So here comes some first-hand information.

1. Legacy boot

My first conclusion after extensive tinkering and testing is exactly the same as what has been mentioned in several comments to my previous post. 

The key to using Linux successfully and comfortably with UEFI/Secure Boot systems is the presence of configuration options in the BIOS. 

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I cannot make any general comments here about how common that is, because this HP dm1 is the only such system that I own so far. But on this system, the presence of "Secure Boot enable/disable" and "Legacy Boot enable/disable" gives me all the control I need. I will discuss this more below, but for now the important point is that by enabling Legacy Boot (which automatically disabled Secure Boot), I can load whatever distributions I want on this system, in exactly the same way that I do on any other of my systems.

After wiping Windows 8 and installing nothing but Linux during the previous blog post, I decided to go back and see what it would be like to try to get Windows 8 and Linux to co-exist. To that end, I contacted HP support and ordered the Windows 8 recovery media for this system. 

The support person I dealt with was friendly and helpful, and I was told that the media had been ordered for me the next day. It took longer than I would have expected, but about two weeks later it actually arrived - and I was surprised to see that it was a bootable USB stick, rather than the usual collection of DVDs. Congratulations to HP for this, to begin with.

Booting the recovery media and doing a "Factory Recovery" installation of Windows 8 was reasonably easy, but of course the actual installation took much, much too long. 

Something like two or three hours just to restore the base operating system and then install the device-specific hardware drivers, and then another hour or two to play the still "Windows Update" game, with multiple sequences of "search for updates, install updates, reboot". 

The good news, anyway, is that after a half day or so the dm1 was once again running Windows 8 exactly as it had been when it came out of the box.

2. EFI Secure Boot enabled, Legacy Boot disabled

Next I tried installing Linux, with the BIOS in the factory configuration - EFI Secure Boot enabled and Legacy Boot disabled.

In this configuration I have only been able to install Ubuntu (12.10 and 13.04 pre-release), and Fedora (18 pre-release).  After mentioning in my previous post that Fedora 18 would not install in this configuration, I was contacted by Adam Williamson. 

He told me that the Fedora 18 Beta did not have the final UEFI/Secure configuration yet, which is not a surprise, and a short time later he pointed me to a newer F18 test release which did have the complete Secure Boot configuration, so that I could test it.  I was quite pleased to see that it installs and boots with no problem.

However, these installations do not result in what I would consider a normal multi-boot configuration. 

In both cases, after doing a normal Linux installation, when I rebooted the system it booted directly to Windows 8 - it did not boot Grub 2 (Linux) as I would have expected it to do on a "normal" system, and it did not present any kind of Windows multi-boot selection. 

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I did find that if I pressed the "Boot Selection" hot key (F9 on HP systems), I would then get a selection list which listed "OS Boot Manager" (that booted Windows 8), and whatever Linux Secure Boot installations were present - either Fedora or Ubuntu or both. 

I could then select one of the Linux distributions from there, and it would boot normally - but of course this requires paying attention at power-on and pressing F9 before it starts to boot Windows.

I then tried to add the Linux distributions to the Windows boot loader. 

I first tried with bcdedit, using basically the same approach as I have done to add Linux to the Windows 7 boot loader, and when that failed I tried using easyBCD.  Here I made several attempts, first using the easyBCD default configuration for Linux, and then by replacing their mbr boot files with the efi boot files set up during the Fedora and Ubuntu installation. 

All failed miserably. Although it did cause the Windows 8 boot loader to go to a multi-boot selection menu (which is graphical in presentation, rather than the nasty old text-mode multi-boot of Windows 7), it never even came close to booting the Linux systems. All I ever got was a relatively unhelpful message about "required files were missing".

I did learn a few other interesting things about the EFI boot configuration. The Windows 8 installation creates a special FAT-32 partition for EFI Boot, separate from the Windows C: partition. 

When Ubuntu is installed, it will recognise this existing partition, and it will add its own boot configuration to it. However, the Fedora 18 pre-release did not use this existing partition by default, it created a new partition for its EFI boot configuration.

This is not a big deal, and obviously the boot loader is able to recognise this since Fedora is showing up in the F9 boot select menu, but I am a bit fanatical about not using extra partitions, so I found that if you set up the partitions manually during Fedora installation, you can actually point it specifically to this partition for its /boot/efi setup, and it will then not create its own partition.

Another thing that I found was that when I selected one of the Linux installations to boot, it then came up with Grub 2 (which is of course what I would expect). The Grub 2 configuration was capable of finding and listing the other operating systems installed on the disk, so if I ran update-grub (Ubuntu) or grub2-mkconfig (Fedora), they would both list each other and Windows in the boot list. 

However, it would only actually work with Ubuntu.  That means I could select Ubuntu from the F9 boot selection list, but then when the Grub list came up I could select Fedora, and it would boot.  But if I tried to do the same from the Fedora list, and boot Ubuntu, it would fail. This might well be a pre-release bug, so we will have to wait until the final release (hopefully next week) to see if this has been fixed.

3. Secure Boot disabled but Legacy Boot not enabled

The next step was to disable Secure Boot (but still not enable Legacy Boot).  In this case the results were essentially the same as before, but there is more promise for future compatibility and ease of setup here. 

There is a clear and important distinction between EFI booting and Secure booting - that means, a computer and an operating system can support EFI booting without having the required signed certificate to enable secure booting; that means that any Linux distribution could include EFI boot support without having to add Secure Boot support.  This is a good thing, and as long as the system BIOS includes a switch to disable Secure Boot, it could make life easier in the future.

Finally, as mentioned above, if I turn on Legacy Boot support, the boot loader includes a "shim" which supports boot-sector files in the way that all previous Windows distributions have done. 

Doing this means that you could then load any Linux distribution that was possible on any previous system, without worrying about the issued discussed above.  My only comment on this is that it would be nice to be able to find out if such a BIOS configuration option is available before purchasing a system, but my experience so far indicates that this is not likely to be possible. 

I have a difficult time even finding out from the pre-sales technical information if a system has EFI boot or not, much less whether it is configurable or not.

Next steps

I plan to continue testing and experimenting with this system. The next interesting event is going to be the final release of Fedora 18. 

As soon as that happens I will give it a try, and I plan to report on its installation, configuration, compatibility with secure boot, and cooperation with Windows and other Linux installations. Let's hope that happens next week!