by It's been a few years since I have read up on UEFI. The recommendation, at least, is to not disable it if you don't have to. Security around Windows 8+ doesn't necessarily rely on it, but it is one of the blocks it's built around.
an hour after I start typing this post... I found this article on ZDnet that I guess I missed earlier. It's Secure Boot that is the issue, and some shenanigans that some OEMs like to play with their BIOS firmware with the boot priorities software portion. (I'm looking at you HP. That's right, kids. don't buy an HP. Also, don't buy Dell... or Alienware for that matter.) I'm assuming that "feature" exists because the average user wouldn't be changing their operating system. Attempts at changing it would likely be hackers or other malware, I guess? Most of the distros are supporting UEFI now, and a few have even ponied up for the certs to support secure boot. From what I'm reading, it's just a matter of installing and getting boot priorities set without the BIOS firmware reseting them. (Check the distro for proper support first, of course.)
This is an ASUS mobo, and they've always been pretty straightforward about how things work. I'm experiencing the only issue I've had the last 15 years using ASUS: this mobo doesn't have overclocking exposed, and the RAM upgrade I bought was advertised at 1600 MHz, but is an OC'd 1333.
It's right off the QVL list, too, as working at 1600 MHz.----
As far as distro, I've been looking at Slackware (as I really would prefer streamlined, and don't mind the lack of automation) or Debian. I haven't looked at arch much yet, but the more I read, the more interested I get. Good news is this drive is big enough, and most distros are small enough, I can chop it up in to several 20-50GB partitions to play with. I might pick up a few games under Linux, but I'm not ditching Windows as my goal here is, I think, to develop a client-server system. I really don't want to screw with a Windows server--good for a lot of things, but not everything. The client will either be exclusively Windows or cross platform; I haven't decided.
VDZ wrote:And naturally, for dual booting you'll need to install Linux AFTER you install Windows,
yeah. Windows hooks the boot records in BIOS and doesn't play nice with anything. Microsoft has been doing this since they released the NT kernel in 1993ish (NT 3.x). However, you can always go back in after installing Windows and set up dual booting and your Linux distro should work fine.
Ysh wrote:This is true, but I think only relevant if you will install both operating system on same physical drive. If you have separate drive for each system then you can use BIOS boot order to select which disk to load from.
Everything I'm reading says to do this, but if you have a BIOS that can recognize partitions as a volume (and are using that partition type), you should be fine. SATA is based around the SCSI architecture, and that was designed around volumes that could be partial, full, or multi-drive. However, the different MS format types don't all support this, and I can't recall off the top of my head what's what.
