Hello,

I am relatively new to core installations, which do not depend on apt-get or rpm, etc. and therefore I would have succeeded, if there hadn't been compile errors with my rEFInd installation.

It states:

make[1]: ***[install.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory '/tmp/SBo/refind-0.12.0/refind'
Makefile:84: recipe for target 'gnuefi' failed
make: *** [gnuefi] Error 2

Please help me out.


Kind regards,

Freewarehookie

If this is like most make errors, the real (informative) error messages will be further up the output. The last few messages in a broken make seldom tell you anything!

I assume that you are using the slackbuild to build from source. There is a binary version available to download from www.rodsbooks.com. As it's an EFI program, it doesn't need a distro-specific install. You just unpack it and copy it over to your EFI system partition.

Isn't that a massive security threat, if you are able to modify efi contents that easy?

I am going to try to fetch the real error message to learn how to solve compile errors anyways.
Hope you're patient with me.

The EFI system partition is a partition like any other. It contains files that are like any other files. You determine what goes on that partition. It's your machine!

If you boot with a BIOS, you have to put a bootloader in the MBR, either LILO or GRUB Stage 1. Either is installed as a binary. Is that a security risk?

Actually UEFI is more secure by design (and I'm not talking about Secure Boot, though rEFInd will support that too) because it uses normal files on a normal partition that are open to inspection and not weird pieces of code tucked into magic spaces.

I thought that Rootkits were loading prior to the actual OS, istn't it like that?

Don't they manipulate the MBR or EFI Filesystem or am I wrong?

Kind regards

I'm not an expert on malware but my understanding of rootkits is that they work through the OS. Are you familiar with busybox? It's a single program that emulates the complete set of Linux core utilities.When you give a command like more or ls, instead of launching the program of that name, it launches busybox with a particular point of entry. Now imagine something similar but crafted with malevolent intent. It would run in response to basic shell commands but it would do something different from (or additional to) what those commands were supposed to do.

How a rootkit gets onto your system is a different matter of course. I remember a time when boot sector viruses were common. A lot of people booted from floppies then, and the floppies got passed around among friends and got infected. But you don't hear a lot about those now. I fancy a look in Wikipedia would tell you more than I can. Or a question about rootkits in the security forum.

what about that compiler error. Is that still important? Do you want to solve that? Or do you want to discuss something else?

I will reply again, as soon as I have time to look at it in detail.