Don't want EFI. If feasible, want to install and boot without the EFI directory being placed.

I have an old BIOS laptop, run Slackware64 14.2 and puppy slacko 5.7, along with xenialpup64. Grub4DOS to boot.

Basically, want to boot faster; and why can I not eliminate any EFI bs -from boot?

I'm not a geek, just a mechanic who likes to figure things out. This is why I abandoned Debian and took up Slackware upon systemd being everywhere. To me, its like budweiser -- just because its everywhere does not make it good.

Yeh, I'm looking for the "free beer" type freedom.

Any help appreciated. May not be back here for a day or two.

UEFI is here to stay (and it really isn't that bad... some of it is much better than BIOS and others leave a bit to be desired). Right now, most computers that include UEFI have options to enable "legacy boot" or in other words, BIOS mode. Slackware has to provide the ability to install to UEFI in addition to BIOS.

That being said, Slackware only presents UEFI install options if it is booted under UEFI mode. If you boot it using a BIOS only machine or enable a UEFI option to emulate BIOS, there are no prompts to set up UEFI (because the installer can't detect a UEFI setup).

If you're seeing prompts to setup UEFI, then your machine is not a BIOS laptop (or something is seriously screwed up). It would be UEFI and you'd need to dig into the settings on how to enable their version of BIOS emulation (many times called "legacy boot" or something similar).

Not always! Some UEFIs call it "compatibility support module" or csm. It's almost as if they don't want you to find it!

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True! The name might be different depending on your UEFI. You should be able to confirm it using Google with either your computer/laptop model number or your motherboard model number.

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Acceptance, damn acceptance!
Someday, I'll have to get one (UEFI machine)
Thanks for replies, hazel and bassmadrigal!

I will say it isn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. I did have to tweak my 14.2 install since I was using NVMe and it isn't properly supported in 14.2 (this has been fixed in -current), but all that's different is that I need to copy my kernel and initrd to /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/ and update the elilo.conf file (I don't typically remove older kernels, just add new ones). There is no need to run "elilo", as the UEFI firmware can read the elilo.conf without issue. And if you're comfortable with lilo, elilo is not much different.

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