[nmglug] Meeting tonight,

[Ted Pomeroy]

NMGLugers and  Jared, thank you all for the help and reminders. Yes, the
ESP - EFI partition is 512MB, not GB; and yes it seems better to go forward
with the current standards. My latest install on a newer machine defaulted
to 2 partitions: ESP and /. Swap is in a swapfile. Seems to work smoothly
and no complaints on bootup. I can use efibootmgr to assess delay and boot
order if needed, but this is a single OS box for a friend. Interesting to
be back at the point of checking the bios settings and going with the
manufacturers on this. And yes, AHCI for the hard drive - an SSD in this
case.
See you all in a couple of weeks. Thank you, Ted P

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 7:21 PM ABQLUG <community at abqlug.com> wrote:

> Sorry I couldn't make it. I just finished working on the queue at my
> full time job.
>
> UEFI and AHCI is what you want to use.
>
> I also have had more luck by letting the distro automatically partition
> the hard drive. UEFI/EFI expects the /boot partition to be fat32. You
> would typically flag it as a EFI partition. I've setup it up plenty of
> times manually so I know it can work manually. But it doesn't sound like
> you tried /boot with fat32.
>
> I try to install everything with UEFI. But some older machines that use
> "hybrid UEFI" (before UEFI was good). For those 12+ years old machines,
> I stick to the legacy BIOS. But only because I'm forced to.
>
> Performance wise I don't think there is a real difference. With newer
> machines, there might be. My newest computer is a AMD bulldozer 8350 on
> an old ASUS Sabertooth motherboard.
>
> There might be a time in the future where hardware will only work with
> UEFI. But if the older BIOS supports ACPI, then newer hardware shouldn't
> have issues with legacy BIOS.
>
> The advice I have heard over the years was to avoid UEFI booting in
> favor of legacy BIOS. I think the big "fear" was the addition of secure
> boot.
>
> I typically disable secure boot, unless it's a Ubuntu OS running.
> Secure boot is more or less of a joke, according to some of the research
> I've seen. And some of the less well known distros might not have access
> to the secure boot signing keys, so I just leave it off for them.
>
> I typically recommend trying out UEFI with AHCI (not IDE or RAID) and
> leaving secure boot off. It's worked for me for years.
>
> Also, the EFI shell is interesting. Theoretically if you know the right
> shell commands in EFI, you can get away without having any separate
> partition of EFI. (fat32)
>
> ~ Jared
>
> On Aug 27 2020 10:23 AM, Ted Pomeroy wrote:
> > I recently made some effort to take advantage of the UEFI settings
> > for two laptops: I took a fresh Xubuntu 20.04 usb media and tried to
> > install with UEFI support. Didn't work, "Partition table not good"
> > was
> > the gist of the error. I tried a second usb of the same OS and
> > learned
> > from it that I need a "Bios boot dedicated partition of at least 5
> > GB." Aha, that helped, so I partitioned manually: bios=5Gb,
> > root=80Gb,
> > home=150Gb and Swap=6Gb. This is where I forgot to give a mount point
> > for the home partition, which I corrected later. Still wouldn't boot.
> > So instead of panic, I tried Bios setting, first defaults which
> > didn't
> > work, then adjusted Sata to ACHI, and finally under UEFI, turned that
> > ON, and Presto!- Ubuntu appeared in the bios UEFI settings as my only
> > UEFI sub-choice. Now it boots and the partitions match what the
> > hardware expects.
> > The result of my work put me back in touch with examining the BIOS
> > settings and thinking through the options and deciding not to accept
> > "Legacy mode" as the only or first choice. I wonder what the feelings
> > of other Linux users are on this issue. What are the advantages of
> > using the UEFI settings vs. the more easily booted "Legacy mode"?
> > Ubuntu and Mint make the EFI system work quite well. Unless I am on
> > an
> > even older machine why use the Legacy?
> > Just a few thoughts to remind us of our NMLUG meeting tonight,  Aug.
> > 27, 5:30-7:00. See the Virtual Meeting link for the Jitsi address at
> > Nmglug.org  Thank you, Ted P
> > _______________________________________________
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> > nmglug at lists.nmglug.org
> > http://lists.nmglug.org/listinfo.cgi/nmglug-nmglug.org
>
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