bjoernvold.com

Late last year one of my systems suffered terminal hardware problems. I decided to rebuild my two systems into one, using the best parts of each and a few new items. I'm slow at the best of times and I wanted to experiment with different configurations and so in order to have something to use while that was ongoing, I bought a cheap wee Compaq, which, of course. came preloaded with the abominable Windows 8 and Secure Boot.

With the rebuilding complete, it came time to investigate what to do with the Compaq. HP "helpfully" provided an eight page document describing how to disable Secure Boot. The effect of that document , perhaps intentionally, was to create the impression that disabling Secure Boot was tantamount to rocket science. I found the couple of relevant paragraphs and it turned out that to disable Secure Boot and EFI, and switch to Legacy Boot involved little more than entering BIOS and making a few configuration changes - all done in a matter of seconds.

I now have Mageia 3 installed on that machine. It is a small victory but I enjoy even small victories, when they are achieved over the Stalinists in Redmond.

Jim

Good to know that is does not take a triple somersault to disable secure boot in UEFI.

By creating a complicated instruction with small text and difficult words MS might achieve what they are after though...
Reserving the hardware for Windows 8 is probably as important as the security aspect - if not even more so.
It will be enough to scare away the non-techies.

I had a visitor with Windows 8 on an Asus with touch screen so I have had my first experience with it. That touch the screen stuff was only good for one thing IMO and that was for scrolling.

Clicking links with the finger was rather hopeless and the user actually prefered the mouse to find the old Kontrollpanel too.

I originally thought it was a good idea to combine touch screen with a keyboard but you mostly end up using the mouse and the keyboard.
Having the laptop act as a smartphone, simply does not work

Did you manage to run a LiveCD on it? I don't think that is possible without disabling secure boot - not even with the Microsoft partner OpenSuse?

Yes, it seems that you need to disable Secure Boot in order to run anything except the preloaded Win 8. A large part of HP's document about disabling Secure Boot addressed what should be relatively simple matters, such as installing drivers for new devices and restoring the virgin installation.

After disabling Secure Boot, I was able to boot from a Mageia 3 live CD (to check that the hardware was all supported). I then disabled all the EFI stuff before installing Mageia. (Grub has a module that supports EFI boot, but it is still experimental and I had no desire to keep Win 8 anyway.)

Jim