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UEFI Secure Boot Booted From Debian 9 'Stretch' (theregister.co.uk)
Debian's release team has decided to postpone its implementation of Secure Boot. From a report: In a release update from last week, release team member Jonathan Wiltshire wrote that "At a recent team meeting, we decided that support for Secure Boot in the forthcoming Debian 9 'stretch' would no longer be a blocker to release. The likely, although not certain outcome is that stretch will not have Secure Boot support." "We appreciate that this will be a disappointment to many users and developers," he continued, "However, we need to balance that with the limited time available for the volunteer teams working on this feature, and the risk of bugs being introduced through rushed development." The decision not to offer Secure Boot support at release leaves Debian behind Red Hat and Suse, making it the only one of Linux's three main branches not to support the heir-to-BIOS and the many security enhancements it offers.
This is an example of why 20 years later, I'm still running RedHat/Fedora/Centos family distros.
I want all my FLOSS software to work. And I want business integration to work too. I don't want to have to choose them because they're not actually in conflict.
Several of my boards support UEFI boot, or CSM Boot but the Secure Boot Portion can be turned off (or is absent in the case of one of my boards. I have one of the few early boards that has UEFI but not Secure Boot.). You can do a UEFI Boot without SecureBoot Verification like Macs do,
I wish we would stop using the word Security when we really mean Vendor Lock-in.
Lot of FUD being spread in this article. Debian certainly supports UEFI, the *true* "heir-to-BIOS." Secure Boot was a terrible technology from the start. It's disappointing that they weren't able to finish work on it in time, but this certainly isn't the huge issue this article is making it out to be. The majority of Debian installations are going to be in virtualised environments in the first place. Desktop users are probably going to be on testing or another Debian derivative. It kind of makes me angry that Ubuntu didn't contribute this code to Debian straight away, but what can you do.
The vast majority of hardware vendors do not enable secure boot by default anyway. If you bought a prebuilt machine from an OEM that does, you'll have to learn to turn it off, but such vendors were already doing their best to stop new users from installing Linux so it's not like many of them would have succeeded anyway. Debian's action here is triage, nothing more.
Can't believe adults rant so much, so often about systemd. Get over it, for goodness sake...
Of course. And the reason for the PATRIOT Act is it's patriotic.
Well, it only took them one whole release to realize avconv was a mistake, but there is a lot more funding behind systemd, so I worry it may take longer.
Of course, if enough people start migrating to Devuan before Stretch is released, maybe they'll get a clue quicker.
They did. It's called the Devuan fork. I've been using it on some multimedia PCs at home and so far so good.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Since "secure" boot is anything but and basically just DRM on steroids, it does not matter much in real life. The only thing to do about it is to make sure to buy hardware were it can be turned off.
As to "heir of BIOS", well maybe. At this time it is still usually a step back. For example, I have an utterly stupid Acer UEFI implementation that cannot boot from memory stick in either mode. It can boot from USB CDROM (go figure), so for a new installation I have to keep an USB CDROM burner and some rewriteables around. That is not impressive at all. It also keeps its UEFI boot files in a non-standard location, just to make things more interesting.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
For variable values of "secure". In fact you have to be doing pretty dumb things to get any security benefit from "secure" boot and if you are doing these dumb things you will be compromised anyways, just by a different path. There is actually no good reason to turn on "secure" boot.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unfortunately, Devuan has a lot less infrastructure support than Debian. That takes time and money to build. So far development on Debian largely works automatically with Devuan, so that hasn't caused much trouble, but it will predictably cause more trouble ahead as divergence inevitably means more work to make packages work for both. Even more lamentably there are reports that systemd is causing intentional incompatibilities. This isn't just a repeat of information that isn't as good as second-hand, so don't take it seriously, but merely as something to watch for.
That said, if Devuan makes a go of things, there will be a need for more volunteer developers. Do your skills fit?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Secure Boot has no lawful purpose, at all. It is designed only to prevent you using your device how you want.
The mission of "Secure Boot" is not to secure any computers, but to secure Microsoft's revenue stream.
Yes, you may be able to disable it on your desktop, but will this situation continue? Remember those Surface RT tablets?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They usually are more careful about who they buy hardware from.
Why would those OEMs care which OS an end user installs after they've got their money?
I don't think you're really this stupid. I think you're just being paid to claim to be this stupid. Get fucked, shill.
Even more lamentably there are reports that systemd is causing intentional incompatibilities. This isn't just a repeat of information that isn't as good as second-hand, so don't take it seriously, but merely as something to watch for.
I suspected/expected that would occur. Any pointers to background there?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
and amd / intel / supermicro / others have the server market that is very non windows to deal with as well.
How horrible that consumers are given the choice as to which OEM to buy from, and can presumably determine if a new machine meets their needs or not in this regard
Provided they have the budget for a new machine in the first place.
Checking before buying doesn't work in several situations. One is switching from Windows to Linux or from Windows to a Windows/Linux dual boot without wanting to have to buy all new hardware. Another is minors and charities, which tend to depend on donations of random hardware by those who haven't done research. A third is when after doing the research, you conclude that no manufacturers offer Linux-friendly laptop or convertible laptop/tablet PCs in a particular size range factor with a warranty in your country.
Why not educate me then?
In fact I am getting paid right now... but that has nothing to do with this post. Some of us have day jobs which involve more than just venting on the internet. Try again.
Believe it or not, people can disagree without being a shill.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Considered. I'll pass.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Sorry, I made an editing mistake, and there's no way to correct a post if you don't notice it until after you've posted. That should have read:
This is just a repeat of information that isn't as good as second-hand, so don't take it seriously, but merely as something to watch for.
That's what happens when you do a re-write and aren't really careful.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Is dual-booting even *viable* anymore? I did it for years, but sometime around Windows 7, Windows just became too damn hostile to dual-boot... as in, every time I booted into Windows after running Linux, Windows insisted on taking a sidetrip to analyze/fix its ACLs that could take anywhere between 30 seconds and 3 days to complete (usually, 2-7 minutes).
The sad truth is, if you have files larger than 4 gigs, there really *isn't* a filesystem anymore that's natively and robustly supported by both Windows and Linux that both can safely share and use directly. Using ext2/3 with Windows is almost data-suicidal, Linux pretends exFAT doesn't exist, and Windows throws a tantrum if some other OS touches a NTFS partition it regards as its own (not to mention, Windows imposes requirements on NTFS that NTFS *itself* doesn't... it's *really* easy to accidentally get a NTFS filesystem into a state that works fine in Linux, but causes Windows to throw a tantrum (max path length, allowable characters in filenames, etc.).
For a quick & easy example, dual-boot into Linux, and back up your Windows c: drive to a tarball. Now untar it into a path like '/oldWinC', boot into Windows, and try to access those files. Windows will bitch about path length, because its IE cache files max out the allowable path, and restoring them to a subdirectory instead of '/' causes the limit to be exceeded.
good luck finding parts from which to build a compact laptop.
In addition many manufacturers will build you a workstation to your requirements, you just have to make it worth their while to do it.
Looks at list of laptops sold by System76
How would an individual go about "mak[ing] it worth their while" for System76, ZaReason, ThinkPenguin, and other Linux laptop makers to make a laptop smaller than 13 inches?
Looks at pricing of base configuration of said System76 laptops
What goes into a Linux laptop to make it cost as much as two or three entry-level Windows laptops?