Anyone tried installing on a 64bit EFI system yet? I recently purchased a
new computer with Windows 8 installed. I didn't put a whole lot of thought
into the purchase other than the thought that I should at least try Windows
8 before knocking it myself.
Of course, I absolutely loathed the experience, and I decided there's nothing
on it that I really needed. So, I decided to give Debian a try, since I
hadn't run it in years. I very quickly found out that it did not have the
standard BIOS, but EFI instead (I guess all 64bit systems have it? I dunno).
I had read a little bit about EFI on Slashdot, as well as SecureBoot. I
knew Ubuntu had been working on keys for SecureBoot; I don't know about
Debian. I had trouble getting Debian to install early on, so I decided to try
Ubuntu 12.04LTS, which was what I had before. Ubuntu decided a short while
back to ditch limiting their ISO's to under 700MB for compact discs, so a CD
install was out for their standard install. I tried a USB install, but for
some reason I had a little trouble with that at first. In the end, I think
12.04 didn't have a proper video driver for my system. I wound up playing
it safe by burning a network install ISO to CD, which booted fantastically,
and I started off by installing a minimal system to ensure a good boot before
spending the time installing everything else from the network.
It was a rather frustrating experience, but in the end I didn't have to change
anything in the EFI firmware other than the boot sequence. If anyone ends up
with this system and wants to maintain dual boot, don't enable CSM... it's
basically BIOS, and Linux will not partition for EFI, which expects a special
boot partition. Luckily I read about all this before trying to goof around
with that. Otherwise, if you don't need/want Windows 8 at all, CSM might be
a good option, and could save some headache if you want to do a "standard"
install.
Anyhow, anyone else have any experience with Linux EFI installs? Perhaps my
experience was just an example of the three P's?
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