Which is odd, considering they sell workstations with Linux. Maybe it depends on the system?

http://shopping1.hp.com/is-bin/INTER...sfamily/buynow

They not only sell workstations with Linux, also sell notebooks with SLED, they have their own Unix derivate HP-UX and they maintain the HPLIP project. But they tell customizers, that they only support Windows 8. How disorganized is that?

Weird, I kind of wondered because on the workstations, of course, Win 7 is standard because workstation programs and drivers are currently supporting Win 7... or Linux... but not Win 8. Oi.

Thank you everyone for your hard work and time testing and improving the UEFI support. The user community and developers are what make Slackware so amazing!

When I asked HP about Linux on some of their computers I got a little more detailed explanation. HP supports the Linux that they provide with their workstations or servers but not other versions of Linux or Linux on other HP computer systems. Of course Linux will work on a lot of HP machines even if HP doesn't officially support that. It's a good idea to research any computer model for Linux compatibility before buying. I think that I would rather pay the extra money to a computer builder who specializes in Linux systems rather than paying extra to HP for "server" or "workstation" class machines that come with Linux.

I haven't checked recently, but when I did some time ago, HP offered some laptops with a choice of pre-installed SuSE Linux or Windows. The Linux version was cheaper, and the difference in price was just about as much as the price for a Windows licence. So if you want to buy a HP device, and if you want to be sure that Linux runs on that hardware, buy the one with pre-installed SuSE Linux. BTW, unlike other manufacturers, HP has a reputation for properly installing Linux on its devices, when they do.

So you can check, if the setup of the pre-installed system is already ok for you, and if this is not the case, tweak it or replace it with whatever you prefer, e. g. Slackware.

gargamel

Just to let Pat know it worked fine here created a usbUEFIboot stick
Cheers John

1 members found this post helpful.

I had the opportunity to try -current with kernel 3.10.14, that was the early October iso on Alien Bob's site. Made a usb bootable image with Rufus under Windows 7 for UEFI and GPT support and booted it successfully on a HP z220 workstation. The bios was set to Legacy+UEFI mode, with UEFI devices booted first, so I assume it successfully booted into UEFI mode. Hoping to install it for real when my new machine arrives, unless 14.1 comes out first, in which case it'll go on instead.

I now have a new Toshiba P55-A5312 and I am trying to install 14.1RC2. What I'm struggling to determine is what the status is of booting the install DVD under UEFI. I have attempted to boot a DVD of the .iso created using Eric's mirror-current script. It boots fine in Legacy BIOS mode, but thus far I have not been able to boot it under UEFI. I have disabled Secure boot and forced booting from DVD, but no joy - it just goes straight to the normal Win8 boot sequence. Should the install DVD in principle boot from UEFI at this stage, or is there some special trick required. I saw a page or two ago some discussion about grub 2 treatment of optical devices vs. USB and such, but it also appears some have had success booting from the DVD.

What am I missing?

Thanks,

Dave

Build the iso with the command described in
if you build it that way it will give you a UEFI bootable DVD
Select it in your boot manager and you should be good to go.
Be careful not to overwrite your windows stuff.
Hope that helps
John

Thanks for that, John. I'd read through a bunch of the READMEs, but neglected that one. I'll give it a whirl.

Dave

Well, I tried that and the DVD now loads to GRUB 2.0, but it goes straight to the grub command line with no menu entries presented.

I tried issuing the commands from grub.cfg manually, but I get this error:

The files seem to exist and be readable from grub:

I'm stumped. Any ideas, anyone? Since I'm without a DVD burner in Linux right now, I had to burn the .iso from Windows rather than using cdrecord or growisofs. Would that have created some issue?

Dave

Okay, I didn't make the connection when I made my last post, but now I see that this issue with the bare grub prompt is the issue Erik_FL replied to on the previous page with info and suggestions about limitations when using optical media. Perhaps I am a victim of such firmware idiosyncrasies.

Occam's Razor

I just discovered that somehow the ISO image became corrupted/truncated when transferred between machines so that, although the various files appear to exist, they are unreadable. Burning a new image now which I expect to solve the problem.

Edit: Well, not quite. Now I get the menu prompt, but when I select one of the Slackware entries it briefly looks like it is going to work and then falls back to the menu and hangs.

If I manually enter the grub commands at a command prompt I get:
Searching around, it looks like other people have had this problem here, but I haven't found anything about how to resolve it.

Okay, just to wrap up this stream of posts of mine, this latest thing with the "couldn't terminate EFI services" appears to be an upstream problem in grub that has been fixed but is not yet in the stable release:

http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?37280

The other thing I have discovered is that it is not, in fact, hung. Rather it appears that the keyboard map is corrupted. As it happens "a" seems mapped to CR and if upon the return to the menu I press "a", the Slackware entry boots successfully. It's as though the EFI termination succeeds partway on the first try, and completes on the second try.

Hopefully this will get rolled into the stable branch soon.

Edit: I've applied this patch from upstream:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gru...9adc2e2e970440

and once grub is rebuilt and new efi images created, everything works as it should.

Dave