Hey,

I have been trying to install Linux to my laptop since I got it but without any success.
There are plenty information about installing Linux in this kind of conditions -- but I find information confusing, hard to understand or it just doesn't work.

So, so far I have done these things:
1. Made standard Slackware 14 installation from USB drive, no problems there. Made partitions with 'gdisk' of type 'fat'. One for root and one for home.

2. Have been trying to boot this installation by using: supergrubdisk/, Slackware installation USB drive (passing custom command 'boot: hugesmp.s root=/dev/sda7/ rdinit=ro' and without rdinit=ro, getting kernel panic).
With GRUB super disk same thing, 'not syncing VFS....' and 'init not found.....'

3. Installed Ubuntu with 'WUBI', it looked promising but after rebooting I got error message saying that 'somefileidontremember.efi' is missing.

4. Installed 'elilo' -- LILO for EFI but wasn't able to make it work, it just didn't work at all.

5. Have heard about GRUB2, but as far as I readed instructions, I find everything too advanced and confusing


I really don't care about distribution (no Ubuntu), just want to successfully boot Linux up.
I'm also cool booting Linux from usb drive.

You do not have to use BIOS legacy. GRUB2 successfully boots from EFI mode on my machine. All that needs to be done is to disable Secure Boot in EFI. I use the GPT disk partitioning scheme on my laptop's hard drive successfully.

I would avoid WUBI to install to an existing Windows partition. It is a filesystem inside a file on the Windows partition, and is very vulnerable to hard crashes.

Although I'm not sure if 2 is the result of 1, why did you make your partitions type 'fat'? Use a native(?) Linux one like ext3.

What kind of laptop do you have? I suspect Sony has my Vaio locked to Windows8 in EFI mode because that's all I can get to boot no matter what I do. I've even blanked out the drive and tried a new Linux install and it wouldn't boot for some reason. Kept saying no OS found.

For Slackware, did you try this.

It appears the beta cd/dvd listed has efi, also beta 3 will do automatic/guided partititions & create its own efi.
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=81120
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/

I think one big problem with this whole EFI stuff is that the working install procedure varies quite a lot between different motherboards.

I have an asus laptop and I have not yet come across any Linux installer that worked out of the box. The only way I got it working was using a bootable usb drive with an EFI shell to create boot entries manually.
I have posted the procedure that was successfull on my machine here. (Hope this link to an external forum is appropriate)

I have reused this procedure successfully for other distros as well (Archbang and Aptosid) so it's not limited to Crunchbang.

I have as Asus Vivobook laptop, and the Wheezy D-I worked just fine, once SecureBoot was disabled.

Unfortunately, it seems the problem is that as long as EFI has been around, there are a few distributions that have been a little on the slow side to adopt EFI, or do so properly.

The lastest live Ubuntu image worked without issue on the same laptop, while Mint had an admittedly broken EFI implementation on an installed operatying system. Unfortunately this whole EFI thing as of now is a shot in the dark if a specific distro will work or not without some effort.

Sorry for the delay. I have an Asus Vivobook S200. I disabled secure boot, plugged in a USB stick with Wheezy D-I, and selected it from the boot manager and installed. I did not at any time disable Fast Boot nor enable CSM. My laptop works fine with them enabled, and Wheezy is the only OS on the machine.