UEFI Notebook

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 6:03 AM, Martín Marqués <martin.marques at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have a new Acer Aspire One with Windows 8. The question that came up
> was when I realized that it had UEFI instead of BIOS (which I read, is
> what we're going to have to deal with from now on).
>
> What precautions should I take with UEFI? Disable the Secure Boot?
> (Read that I have to disable it to get grub to work)?

You do not have to disable Secure Boot to boot Fedora 18 and later
with GRUB.  (Though you still want to for other reasons, like
experimenting with other UEFI bootloaders.)

> Just now I'm getting on top of this technology, but maybe some of you
> guys had experience with this and can give me some hints!

Basically, just use a Live USB install instead of a media install.
There's a nasty bug in Fedora 18 that prevents UEFI from working
properly from spinning plastic [1] (that link claims its just a Mac
problem but I experienced the same issue with a Dell).  You should
also use the `livecd-iso-to-disk` utility to prepare the USB stick for
full UEFI support.  For more information, see this [2], especially the
UEFI section.

If you experience difficulty with Fedora 18, you might want to give
F19 Alpha [3] a shot, they've fixed quite a number of UEFI bugs in the
install process for this new release.  (Also I found that with F19
spinning plastic worked better for me than USB, but I later discovered
my USB stick was dying so that might have been just me.  ;-)

-T.C.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F18_bugs#mac-uefi-dvd
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB#Command_line_method:_Using_the_livecd-iso-to-disk_tool_.28Fedora_only.29
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease