Maximum PC

http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstr ... ux-booting

Windows 8 OEM specs may block Linux booting

"September 20, 2011, 9:45 PM —

After years of trying to cut off Linux growth as a desktop platform on x86 and x64 PCs, Microsoft may have actually figured out a way to stop Linux deployments on client PCs dead in their tracks.

At the very least, Linux deployment will be hindered on any Windows 8-certified machines to come, as new requirements for the Windows 8 logo come to light.

Red Hat's Matthew Garrett was one of the first to notice that according to the new logo rules, all Windows 8 machines will need to be have the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) instead of the venerable BIOS firmware layer. BIOS has been pretty much the sole firmware interface for PCs for a long time...."

"EFI, and the later UEFI specification, is not the problem for Linux. The problem is Microsoft's other requirement for any Windows 8-certified client: the system must support secure booting. This hardened boot means that "all firmware and software in the boot process must be signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA)..."

"It's not just a matter of replacing the UEFI system on the device with other, unencrypted, firmware. If all parts of the chain need to have a CA signature, then swapping out a machine's signed EFI layer with, say, an unsigned BIOS or EFI would not work. Garrett described the problem in more detail:

"Microsoft requires that machines conforming to the Windows 8 logo program and running a client version of Windows 8 ship with secure boot enabled. The two alternatives here are for Windows to be signed with a Microsoft key and for the public part of that key to be included with all systems, or alternatively for each OEM to include their own key and sign the pre-installed versions of Windows. The second approach would make it impossible to run boxed copies of Windows on Windows logo hardware, and also impossible to install new versions of Windows unless your OEM provided a new signed copy. The former seems more likely."

Fun, fun, fun!

I'm filing this with movies won't play without HDCP...which I seem to recall was one of the mythnomers about Vista when that was being developed.

Seriously...you're MS...why would you limit yourself to machines that have UEFI.

I don't know what they'll actually do but part of me doesn't care anymore. Linux will (at this rate anyway) never be able to fully replace my daily machine. It has been not much more than a toy for me for a while.

However, I don't think they should be doing anything to block an OS. Although Apple kind of does this already... right?

Um, no?? Bootcamp is Apple software which ships with every Intel-based Macintosh. Its purpose is to facilitate dual-booting of Windows (or Linux) on their hardware.

Kind of. You can't buy their OS and put it on whatever you want. It is sort of the same thing. It is a manufacturer telling me what I can and can't do with what I buy. Some argue that software is totally different and it might be so... But the idea is not a new one.

I'm not sure that the machine even boots without that module working correctly either...

...and I believe though that we'll see the original intents of what that was supposed to be rather then what Apple molded it to be.

Yeah I was pretty sure this only worked cuz Apple dId you could with Bootcamp. Ironic you need an e,TFS bit of software to make it work.

Wouldn't this leave out EFI machines built now? I mean, they don't have signed keys now.
This would be a really really stupid idea on Microsoft's part. I'm also not sure there are any laptops that run EFI/UEFI instead of BIOS. All the ones I have seen still use the venerable old BIOS system.

And if Microsoft tries to kill Linux with something like this, there will be bloodshed. I know a few people who would suicide bomb Redmond if MS ever did anything to deny Linux the ability to run on anything.

The only thing worse than this is the SOPA/PIPA.

I thought of that myself. You would appear to be quite right.

But...

There is an article (okay, from September 2011) that says M$ will leave it up to OEMs to decide whether users will be able to disable Secure Boot. So it might appear that individual system builders such as us will need to find out whether Secure Boot is capable of being disabled when shopping for a new motherboard.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/09/micr ... x-worries/

Also, don't about 80something percent of PCs still use BIOS?
I think the shiny new XFX X58i mobo I just got will not be compatible.
Actually, at this point, Win8 does not look all that great to me. The Metro UI looks horrible, but that's a discussion for another thread.

I learned enough German to understand this and enough english to not want to translate it for you. Still, pretty funny.

Good .. crap ... good .. crap.

Why hesitate on the translation?

It's actually "shit" but yeah.

Windows 95: Home of the General Protection Fault. I got one 5 min. after the install completed on a vm.
Windows ME: Bluescreen 10 min. after install (dad's pc way back when. I was 3 at the time.)
Vista: Screwed up drivers, then bluescreen 3 min. after install.
Windows 8: It wasn't a GPF or a normal bluescreen, but something happened 5 min. after I installed the dev preview. Go figure.

Shit and crap are synonyms. They differ only in that shit is considered more crass than crap.

Since Scheisse isn't considered terribly offensive, I think that crap is a more accurate translation.

Yes
Still, the dev preview of 7 was pretty stable on my system.

Isn't it kinda funny that the first words someone teaches you in a language are the expletives?

and this is coming from a kid who was born on or later than 1995... telling us shit about how "bad" win95 was...

Is that enough eyerolls there for you to figure out that's sarcasm?

no... that's pretty fucking normal. In junior high, I knew how to cuss people in 38 different languages.

It was a vm so I could find out just how bad it was. Everyone talks about how it was bad... I wanted direct experience and to play Sonic CD.

win95 wasn't bad, you just have to know how to use it. While win98 took to fame as being the "win7" fix over win95, it still was a very capable OS that was a major milestone for windows; specially over 3.1. It wasn't without fault or bugs as opposed to mac's then current OS. A big proponent of why people hated win95 was the fact that it didn't support usb straight out of the box (had to wait for 95 usb edition), used over 200MB of hard drive space (compared to win 3.1 15-20mb) and other high system requirements.

Remember, this was the time when 1gb hdd's costed like $200-300 so having 1/5 of your harddrive (although seemed like a good deal since 200mb drive from 1993/94 was the same price) used just for the OS felt very restrictive. Also it pushed for higher graphical requirements for vram usage so people running on 3.1 systems either had to upgrade (if they could...) or get a completely new system. I remembering having my acer 100 that was my first win95 system, I had to upgrade the vram from 1 to 2mb (was an actual memory chip) to help power resolutions higher than 800x600. And that was for 16bit color instead of the 65k that most 3.1 systems were running at if I remember correctly. Actually, might be one bar lower then that. Acer 65k and 3.1 256?

ME wasn't overly bad either, after I got it to work it was relatively reliable.
Same with Vista, though I couldn't do anything too close to powerusering.