Linux compatability of a couple of laptops?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 04:01:02PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 04, 2013 at 04:08:43PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote
> 
> > Avoid samsung until they fix their UEFI bricking problem. :)
> 
>   The problem is already fixed according to...
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/01/linux_samsung_laptop_fix_advice/

No the fix is NOT the kernel.  The fix has to be in the firmware since
a virus could easily do what the kernel did and kill the machine.
Making linux not trigger it is nice and polite, but isn't a fix.
It's treating the symptoms at best.

> but the fix may take a while to reach the mainstream kernel.  I'd prefer
> to avoid UEFI altogether.  UEFI is proof positive that those of us who
> ranted against Palladium and "Trusted Computing" and the "Fritz chip"
> were not paranoid, after all.

UEFI is just a better BIOS.  Nothing wrong with that.  About time we
got rid of that old pile of shit.

The other things are a seperate issue that could easily have been
implemented with the old style BIOS if people had wanted to (and in
certain cases it was implemented, but not universally).

The issue these days is that microsoft has decided to make UEFI (a
good thing), secureboot (a useful thing for some people) on by default
(not such a good thing) using only microsoft's key (a bad thing),
a requirement for getting windows 8 logo certification.

UEFI is great (unless you implement it the way samsung apparently
did), and means you can use GPT (GUID partion table) which supports
128 partitions and much better boot support on disks larger than 2TB.
The BIOS only supported MBR on disks up to 2GB.  Sure grub could use
a fake MBR table with jump code to fake it on a disk with GPT but it
isn't as clean.  The old partition table was very limited in number of
partitions and the size of the disk.

Even secureboot can be very useful to companies that want to keep their
machines secure and locked down.  Nothing wrong with that.  Microsoft
hijacking it to protect against some types of viruses and preventing
easy installation of other OSs is not great.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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