I bought a $300 eMachines EL1360G-UW11P for a home server to replace my 2001 vintage 800MHz P-III.
I installed linux but it wouldn't boot. Major bummer.
It wasn't clear that UEFI signing was at fault, but there was no other reason for it to refuse to boot the image. The install went fine right through the reboot. I re-installed linux trying several different things, all unsuccessfully. I also booted a "rescue" image and verified the install looked valid.
There was no way to turn off UEFI signing in the BIOS menus.
I went to the manufacturer's web site and found they had a "Linux BIOS" image. http://support.gateway.com/us/en/emac/product/default.aspx?t... I was able to reflash the BIOS with the P01.C1L image, but I had to force it by looking at their "flash.bat" file adding a /X flag to the flash command in there.
With the "linux" BIOS image, the board booted linux just fine. Huh.
Lessons Learned:
* UEFI is a real risk. Most mainstream PCs nowadays boot linux out of the box. I lived through the times when I bought a new PC "at risk" because it might have chips that were not supported by linux. UEFI brings that risk back, but through software, not hardware. Sucks!
* The hardware manufactures apparently are getting the "it must run linux" message, even for low end throw-away machines. Yeah!
* Reflashing BIOSes, especially when the user has to manually override "self protection" aborts, is not something an unsophisticated user is going to be able to do. Sucks.
To be fair: downloading a .iso file, burning the image onto a blank disk, rebooting and entering bios setup, setting boot device order , inserting disk and rebooting again, partitioning disks and doing install process isn't something that an unsophisticated user is going to be able to do without significant guidance though.
The BIOS flashing does add an extra risk factor though, prepare for many "Linux fucked my PC!" rants from users who screwed up the flashing process.
I've used UNetbootin, and as far as I know, there is no way to do a netboot/install without any media.
I took a look at the site, and it doesn't appear to have any information about that. Are you aware of some functionality that isn't listed on the site?
For what it's worth, UNetbootin is a really nice way to create liveUSB drives that you can use to install Linux/BSD.
I think we have different notions of what "network install" means. Yes, you can download packages from the web during the install (perhaps booting from a minimal install, as most net work installs do).
I was really more interested in netboot installs, where the machine downloads a boot image (via TFTP generally) and does the install from there.
In fact, no hard drive is needed in the machine if you want to just boot an image from a network share.
Apple uses a technology like this to reimage boot drives:
I installed linux but it wouldn't boot. Major bummer.
It wasn't clear that UEFI signing was at fault, but there was no other reason for it to refuse to boot the image. The install went fine right through the reboot. I re-installed linux trying several different things, all unsuccessfully. I also booted a "rescue" image and verified the install looked valid.
There was no way to turn off UEFI signing in the BIOS menus.
I went to the manufacturer's web site and found they had a "Linux BIOS" image. http://support.gateway.com/us/en/emac/product/default.aspx?t... I was able to reflash the BIOS with the P01.C1L image, but I had to force it by looking at their "flash.bat" file adding a /X flag to the flash command in there.
With the "linux" BIOS image, the board booted linux just fine. Huh.
Lessons Learned:
* UEFI is a real risk. Most mainstream PCs nowadays boot linux out of the box. I lived through the times when I bought a new PC "at risk" because it might have chips that were not supported by linux. UEFI brings that risk back, but through software, not hardware. Sucks!
* The hardware manufactures apparently are getting the "it must run linux" message, even for low end throw-away machines. Yeah!
* Reflashing BIOSes, especially when the user has to manually override "self protection" aborts, is not something an unsophisticated user is going to be able to do. Sucks.