As it turns out, a colleague was able to install a different Linux
distro on a UEFI secure boot motherboard, despite an initial failure, a
distro that other respondents to the SL list did mention as supporting
UEFI Secure Boot. There are certain peculiarities involved, including
the use of a VFAT (MS format) partition. As it is likely that SL 7 will
require the same mechanism(s) when it is released, I am presenting this
information as probable preview of coming attractions (Linux base tends
to be the same across many different distributions because of the
difficulty of re-inventing the details of hardware support -- even if
details of such things as anaconda versus other installers are quite
different and incompatible). The below reference should be OpenSuSE 12.3 .
From a colleague:
Subject: suse 12.3 install
Got it working on my UEFI system, required a re-install
trick was -
1> ran their default disk allocation - gives you home partition, root
partition, swap partition and (in my case) a 156 MB UEFI partition,
which has to be formatted VFAT. When I tried to manually partition
without knowing this, did not work - there was no way of forcing it to
install a non-uefi bootloader on an uefi motherboard, or to do the uefi
trick on a linux partition.
2> suse requires graphics to finish installation from the partly
installed disk drive rather than the dvd - this is a problem because I
have an NVIDIA card and the nouveau driver does not work on it. The work
around is to select suse 12.3 safe mode on first boot into grub, this
sets it into a default VESA mode which works on everything. I* have it
defaulting to runlevel 3, so once i was able to get past the install, i
was able to kill nouveau and install the nvida driver, it works fine.
3> my USB 3 works fine, but my USB 2 does not. this may be a "feature"
of my Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 motherborad, or it may be that i just haven't
fount the right one out of the exponential
number of combinations I can set in the bios.
End quote.
Yasha Karant
