[ale] new laptop the surprises and the education

[Phil Turmel]

On 12/16/2015 05:19 PM, Narahari 'n' Savitha wrote:
> Friends:
> 
> I helped get a laptop to our contractor and I was in for a surprise. 
> Unlike older laptops this had something called UEFI.  I was in rude
> shock when I realized that I had to do quite a few tweaks to get Legacy
> booting to work so I could set up dual boot. (Uffff.......)
> 
> Any classes have been done on this UEFI and how to use it to dual boot
> or single boot to Linux machine ?
> Any help on this is appreciated.

I've gotten direct kernel booting from UEFI working on my latest media
server, with an Intel server class mobo.  The biggest pain was the
screwed up framebuffer behavior in EFI mode.  It all smoothed out when I
put in the well-supported radeon 5000.  The efibootmgr utility worked
perfectly on that mobo.

I've played a bit trying to do the same with my HP laptop, but it has
custom EFI variables controlling the boot process, and also has problems
handing off the video.  I'll figure it out eventually.  Legacy mode in
the meantime.

Phil