tl;dr version: this is just a heads-up for those, like me, who install machines using PXE rather than USB sticks or CDROM. UEFI is going to make this a PITA until there's a EFI compatible ipxe or gpxelinux.0 and syslinux.
This is entirely unrelated to secureboot/restricted boot, it's just an added complication. the story so far: I just bought a new notebook a few days ago to take to linuxconf, an asus x401u. it's nothing special, i just wanted a cheap xterm & ssh terminal. anyway, rather than blow it away completely and just install debian, I decided to use gparted to shrink the win7 partition and set it up for dual boot. most of that procedure went perfectly smoothly - pxeboot clonezilla to backup its pristine original condition (so i had something to revert to if i screwed up), pxeboot gparted, reboot, then pxeboot debian installer. debian installed w/o a problem until i got to the point of installing grub. The disk has a GPT partition table, and the system is configured for UEFI boot. Apparently Win7 needs UEFI in order to boot from a GPT disk. The latest debian installer fully supports installing to GPT on UEFI systems - the catch is that to load the efivars kernel module (needed so that grub-efi-amd64 and efibootmgr can update the efi boot table), you have to have booted a UEFI boot-loader. Fortunately, the BIOS has an option to enable UEFI network stack, which can then do a tftp boot. so far, so good. Unfortunately, unidonly.kpxe from the ipxe package is not efi compatible. nor is gpxelinux.0 from syslinux. and AFAIK, there aren't any. and none of the syslinux tools like menu.c32 or chain.c32 are efi-compatible (apparently there is an alpha-quality syslinux 6.x series which will be efi) What this means is that (currently) you can't use PXE to install linux on a UEFI system. your only option is to use a USB stick or CD-ROM, and even then only if you can make the system use UEFI to boot from it. (well, you can install linux, you just can't boot it afterwards) this, to put it mildly, sucks. anyway, i've finally made myself a debian live (wheezy) bootable usb stick, and i'm about to try booting and chrooting to get grub installed so i can finally boot linux from the hard disk. craig ps: i kind of wish i had just given up on making it dual boot. i could have disabled UEFI entirely and had far less problems, and i'm not sure i even have any use for the windows partition except maybe for some low-end games. -- craig sanders <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list [email protected] http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main
