Thanks for all your answers, I tried to understand as much as possible and pick up and adapt your advice for my situation as well as I was able to understand it.

@brobr. Thanks, Rob, for elaborating all the details. In fact I had indeed the very same issue with an incorrectly formatted EFI partition. So thanks for the heads up! I was able to cure that using the solution you describe in your previous post you pointed me to. So some progress here!
Unfortunately, however, the answer to your question, if I ever reach the point where the Slackware installer tries to set up elilo, is No. Also, when I try to do it manually by invoking eliloconfig on the command line I always end up with the above mentioned error message: "ERROR: System is not running under UEFI." It works neither in the installation system nor from within the chroot environment of the target system.

@Didier Spaier. Thanks, I followed the steps you describe including mounting sys before chroot, but to no avail. There is no /sys/firmware/efi, and eliloconfig throws an error message that the system is not running "under UEFI". This is annoying, but consistent.
Not sure where to go from here, now --- I am stuck. BTW, you are right: cd /boot is not really necessary, just a bit more comfortable for some tasks that usually follow the installation procedure, such as switching from a huge to a generic kernel. But for eliloconfig it's irrelevant, I think.

@jtsn. In general, yes, but I am surprised that a usually Linux friendly company like ASUS seems to be following this (IMHO wrong) path.
That's probably how this is going to end, I guess. It's a little disappointing, because I was looking forward to the benefits of UEFI mentioned by dugan and others here. E.g., I might add another hard disk and install some flavour of MS Windows on it. Not sure, if this is quite as easy to handle with LILO as with UEFI and elilo.

@AlleyTrotter. Thanks, but unfortunately I cannot do this. My UEFI firmware would allow me to start an EFI shell, if there was one installed in my EFI partition (or somewhere in a reachable partition). But as I am unable to boot my installation media in UEFI mode, the EFI partition never gets populated, and thus I have no EFI shell that I could invoke to follow the steps you recommend. Thanks, anyway!

Thanks to all of you for your great patience! Unfortunately this all seems not to be working here, because I can not manage to boot my installation media in UEFI mode for some reason. I will give this a final shot, however, trying to install another system and see, how it goes. If I can install OpenSUSE 13.2 and boot this in UEFI mode, it should be possible to achieve the same with Slackware, right? So I'll try that now, and report back here afterwards.

gargamel

Ok, here we go. I did not even have to install OpenSUSE 13.2 in order to tell the difference: The OpenSUSE 13.2 installation DVD is recognized as being able to boot in UEFI mode by the firmware of my system, while the Slackware64-14.1 installation DVD is not.

This was amazingly easy to find out. I did not have to install anything; I did not even start the setup proceure. All I did was booting my system into the UEFI firmware setup environment by pressing F2. After double-checking some settings and resetting everything to factory defaults, but before exiting I inserted the OpenSUSE DVD.
Almost immediately an additional DVD drive symbol appeared, representing the same disk drive for which a symbol was already there, but this time with a text label "UEFI". So I have two DVD drive symbols now, one with and one without "UEFI", meaning that the UEFI firmware provides two options to boot the OpenSUSE installation DVD, with or without UEFI mode.

For the Slackware64-14.1 installation DVD this second symbol with "UEFI" never appeared. Which raises the question: How can I create a "UEFI enabled" installation medium for Slackware64-14.1? The usual ISO images don't seem to suppport UEFI boot, at least not in the same way OpenSUSE does and which my UEFI firmware supports.

Any ideas? Thanks a lot!

gargamel

If you have no /sys/firmware/efi (even before chrooting), AFAIK either you have no EFI firmware , or maybe you have one but booting occurred in BIOS legacy mode through a compatibility support module (not sure about that).

To confirm: when you try to boot the Slackware installation DVD, do you see an Isolinux or a Grub greeting screen?

Gargamel, that's good news, means that your machine is (almost) set up ok.

Why Slackware does not see your system as "uefi-enabled" but OpenSuse does, might be because the latter supports Booting When in Secure Boot Mode,
Slackware does not, and uses elilo instead of shim (see http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/).

Please go search in your bios/uefi setup for any option to turn of secure booting (if available at all), especially after "..resetting everything to factory defaults". I won't be surprised that that's the bottle-neck.

Rob

1 members found this post helpful.

But "Secure Boot" should always be put in double quotes, because the only security you gain from this is the security of Nadella's and Whitehurst's financial income.

Probably, but when one is quoting...well....that OpenSuse page needs updating...

@Didier Spaier. I see an ISOLINUX screen with a "boot:" prompt at the bottom.

@brobr. You may be right. However, I am struggling to switch off secure boot.
Seems I ran into a problem that has been discussed in many forums, see for instance this discussion on an Ubuntu forum:
Unable to disable secure boot.
I am reluctant to "clear" all the keys, as suggested in some of these discussions, as my plan is to add another hard disk to the machine and install Windows >=7 on it.

But thinking about Windows and Slackware living on separate disks could liberate me of my worries, that I'd have to switch UEFI/Secure Boot mode every time I switch between the two operating systems. All I would have to do is to select one of them at boot time. Correct?
Of course, I'll have to manage somehow to create a multi-boot menu...

gargamel

This confirms that you you are booting in CSM / BIOS mode. In that case you won't be able to use eliloconfig.

Gargamel, What is the OS set to in the bios/uefi setup?
Try to leave that at 'Windows 8' even if that OS is not (yet) present.

(I think that these settings come with the firmware itself, not necessarily with instaling the OS first). With the option 'others' the manufacturers only mean other MS Windows versions (i.e. less than 8). They don't mean 'linux'. Anyway - in my case that was - only THAT setting (of OS to Windows 8) gave me the 'uefi-mode' as well as seeing the option to enable/disable "secure boot". In other words, the interface of the bios/uefi setup changed in its presentation of possible options depending on some settings (like that for the OS). Yes, it is as confusing as this sentence.

Hope you find it,

cheers,

rob

PS you could ask google to leave out search results with ubuntu by using "-ubuntu" : Then you might find quicker the more informative/helpful answers (say those on an Arch forum)

1 members found this post helpful.

@Didier Spaier. I am afraid so, too, meaning that I cannot exploit the benefits of UEFI with Slackware. I am thinking of installing Slackware with LILO like always before, but I hope that I still would be able to add a second hard disk with Windows and dual boot without hassle.

@brobr.I've tried that, but:

• with OS set to 'Windows 8' the system won't boot from the Slackware installation DVD, as this turns on secure boot (error message is that no bootable medium is found)
• with OS set to 'Other OS' the system boots the Slackware installation DVD, but not in UEFI mode

It seems that the only way to get around this would be to delete all the keys. After that secure boot would be turned off silently, according to some sources. However, while this would help with Linux, it is not what I'd want for (the at some point in the future yet to be installed on a separate disk) Windows side.

That's how I interpret the help text in the pane on the right border of the screen.

Unfortunately the ASUS UEFI BIOS Utility does not allow me to turn off secure boot without turning off UEFI, as well. The only way to do it would apparently be to delete all the signed keys. As I said, I'd rather avoid this, if possible. I haven't tried it and I am by no means sure, if saving and restoring the keys is a simple and reliable thing to do. It may be, but I just have no experience with this stuff, at all.

This is a good tip, thanks, although the Ubuntu discussion I linked to seemed to be quite serious and substantial, as far as I can tell it.

@dugan. My apologies to you! When I jumped into this discussion, I did not (and still to not) intend to hijack it. Now, looking at the number and extent of my posts, one might get the impression, that I did just that. May be I should rather have created a new thread, so sorry for that!

gargamel

Check this out http://www.asus.com/support/FAQ/1004435

Or ask ASUS to give you a way to turn it off (you have their motherboard/laptop). Unless you have an ARM chip I understand that PC-owners should be allowed to turn off secure boot, this has been stipulated by Microsoft...

PS. I think you did not hijack the thread but contribute to it by showing another snag one can run into with this uefi business; maybe people should check vendor-specs and fora before committing to a purchase when they want to use Slackware linux with uefi...jtsn was right.

My UEFI doesn't offer me this Enable/Disable Secure Boot switch... Its greyed out.
Yeah, should be...
See this discussion in the ASUSTeK support forum and this Microsoft web page, which explicitly mentions Linux (!).
Thanks, I can only hope dugan as the original poster sees it similarly.
Regarding research of vendor-specs before purchasing a computer, this is hard to do for someone who is purchasing a new computer only once in five or six years. Who would think of checking the UEFI firmware of a given device?
But even if I had done much more analyses and digged even deeper, I might have chosen the very same mainboard, because UEFI is a specification and a standard, and ASUS used to implement such standards quite accurately.

gargamel

Ok Gargamel, before going offline for the weekend;

1) on that http://www.asus.com/support/FAQ/1004435 they describe how to repair a windows 8.1 upgrade problem. It mentions another boot-option (CSM) that needs to be toggled before "secure boot" settings can be changed. Did you see that CSM option and did you try to change that and see whether "secure-boot" stopped being greyed-out?

2) the link in that discussion you refer to, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../dn481258.aspx, describes a trick to disable "secure booting" from within windows. Maybe install it, try this and after that you can remove that OS again ;-) My comp. had had windows 8 on it for quality control testing before they shipped it to me and then I erased it, but it had been there. (But then I was only interested in getting the legacy mode to run and this automatically turned "secure boot" off)

CSM must be enabled. I tried to set it to "Auto", or to disable it, but in both cases, the system cannot boot from the Slackware installation DVD.
Regarding the greyed-out "secure-boot" option: I now decided to clear the keys (after saving them, of course), and after that the option turned from "enabled" to "disabled". Still no switch to click for setting it, though.
So I managed to switch off "secure boot". I left the setting "Windows 8" for OS type untouched (and did not switch to "Other OS"). This combination of settings should in effect mean:
I thought of this option, too, but as I finally managed to disable "secure boot" (see above), it ain't necessary, I think.

Thanks once again, enjoy your weekend, everyone, good night!

gargamel

When I boot with the Slackware installation DVD inserted I see the ISOLINUX welcome screen.

Yes, seems so. In the meantime I was able to disable "secure boot", while leaving UEFI support untouched. However, with CSM disabled or set to "Auto" the system cannot boot from the DVD. Now I'd say that all pre-installation requirements are met, but still the Slackware installation DVD would not be booted in UEFI mode. I am running out of ideas...

gargamel