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
I'm on the road to Texas today and I doubt my Samsung J2 has enough "horsepower" for jitsi so I'll catch you next month :) On Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 11:24 AM Ted Pomeroy <ted.pome@gmail.com> 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 _______________________________________________ nmglug mailing list nmglug@lists.nmglug.org http://lists.nmglug.org/listinfo.cgi/nmglug-nmglug.org
Don, OK, see you next time. We meet every 2 weeks, so you don't have to wait a month. I hope you have a safe and good trip to TX. Thank you. Ted On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 5:56 PM Don Crowder <donguitar@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm on the road to Texas today and I doubt my Samsung J2 has enough "horsepower" for jitsi so I'll catch you next month :)
On Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 11:24 AM Ted Pomeroy <ted.pome@gmail.com> 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 _______________________________________________ nmglug mailing list nmglug@lists.nmglug.org http://lists.nmglug.org/listinfo.cgi/nmglug-nmglug.org
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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 _______________________________________________ nmglug mailing list nmglug@lists.nmglug.org http://lists.nmglug.org/listinfo.cgi/nmglug-nmglug.org
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@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 _______________________________________________ nmglug mailing list nmglug@lists.nmglug.org http://lists.nmglug.org/listinfo.cgi/nmglug-nmglug.org
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participants (3)
-
ABQLUG -
Don Crowder -
Ted Pomeroy