Slashdot Mirror
UEFI Secure Boot and Linux: Where Things Stand
itwbennett writes "Assuming that Microsoft doesn't choose to implement Secure Boot in the ways that the Linux Foundation says would work with Linux, there 'will be no easy way to run Linux on Windows 8 PCs,' writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols. Instead, we're faced with three different, highly imperfect approaches: Approach #1: Create UEFI Secure Boot keys for your particular distribution, like Canonical is doing with Ubuntu. Approach #2: work with Microsoft's key signing service to create a Windows 8 system compatible UEFI secure boot key, like Red Hat is doing with Fedora."
itwbennet finishes with: "Approach #3: Use open hardware with open source software, an approach favored by ZaReason CEO Cathy Malmrose." When you can't even use a GPLv3 licensed bootloader to boot your system, you might have a problem. Why is everyone so quick to accept the corpse of TCPA in new clothes?
WHAT?!? Secure Boot will do nothing to impede enterprise Windows users. You'll either use Windows8/2012 and have a signed boot loader or use 2008R2/7 and disable secure boot. Btw it would also do nothing to impede enterprise Linux users either, they'd either use a commercial signed distribution or build their own and have the build process install their keys into the TPM chip (trust me, enterprises already deal with crypto from internal PKI to external SSL to drive encryption).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
System admins need to wipe off the OEM stuff and install their Enterprise License stuff on new kit.
Most corporate desktop admins are far happier if the machine can be deployed with less mucking around. Just unboxing 1200 new machines is a pain in the ass... if they also have to reimage and reconfigure each new machine (actually easier and more streamlined than unboxing these days, but nonetheless, extra time, extra money they'd rather not spend), they'll not be so joyous, and everything slows down.
If they can't do it, they will simply ignore Windows 8 and wait for the next version
Half right... because this, basically, is wise. The other half is they will harden what they have. Microsoft early adopters and fanbois notwithstanding, Microsoft has done nothing to increase the productivity of the office worker since XP/Server 2003/Office 2003. The pitfalls of XP are well known and huge incident databases have been built: nothing can break that doesn't have an immediate fix. Seven and even Vista is still in the early stages of figuring out all the solutions of all that can and does go wrong. I think any large or medium sized corporations still on the 2003 paradigm are fine and well under the budget expendature of those idiots that needlessly and irrationally raced to upgrade as long as they are in a rotation of reimaging every XP machine every 4-6 months... if their network infrastructure is resilient to the trouble users can get into, they may never need to upgrade these to new systems until the physical machines and their components cease to function.
Seems to me that this is a very serious violation of the spirit of the antitrust rulings when MS killed netscape. Why aren't our consumer protection agencies stepping in to forbid MS from doing this?