[WLUG] Installling Linux with UEFI?

[Jan Wolter]

I was able to get my machine to boot - needed to select a different
version of GRUB (GRUB-EFI). Never found anything documenting this, but
that's what it was. There was a setting in Yast to change this, but it
didn't work. It said "errors have occurred" without telling me what the
errors were. So I just did a complete new re-install with this option
selected from some undistinguished submenu.

Frankly, no, I'm not willing to dive deep. There was a time when I
approached near total understanding of how Unix systems worked, but that
was with System III, SunOS, and early versions of OpenBSD, and all of
these were essentially very simple. I like the concept of these GUI
administrative tools that modern Linux is buried under - I'll be
perfectly happy never to have to edit another sendmail config file - but
they never seem to 100% work. They hide the details (like the error
message mentioned above) while still assuming that you know the details
(your computer uses UEFI so you need to select GRUB-EFI), and you can't
bypass them because they've taken over control of all the old config
files.

These days my computer is a tool, not a hobby. I want to know as little
about UEFI as I can get away with.

                                 - Jan

On Wed, 2014-11-12 at 19:37 -0500, Pritpaul Mahal wrote:
> I've had no trouble getting UEFI (without secure boot) working on 2
> different Dell laptops. But then I refuse to use GRUB (of any variety,
> ever) in my personal life and for these installs didn't try to use a
> distro where the installer does all the bootloader setup. If you're
> willing to do a deep dive and learn about it and do it yourself, I
> highly recommend http://www.rodsbooks.com/linux-uefi as a general
> reference and his rEFInd bootloader in particular. IIRC I used it
> along with the kernel EFI stub.
> 
> --Pritpaul