So I inherited a Dell laptop (inspiron 15 7559). It had Windows 10 on it, then Ubuntu (18.04, I believe.) I was going to put slackware (current) on it. I made a USB stick from Alien Bob's liveslak (with iso2usb)

This thing will not boot Slackware, unless I turn on legacy BIOS mode. (it does boot Ubuntu without it turned on.) SecureBoot is turned off. Dell weirdness, or? I don't particularly care one way or another, but I'm curious why it won't boot Slackware-current with UEFI on.

I know slackware current and liveslak works fine with UEFI, because that's how I installed Slackware on my desktop. uname -a reports that I'm using 5.4.48, so it's definitely current, and definitely 64-bit.

why not just go stright for an up to date current iso : http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/sla...4-current-iso/


My PC is 64 bit and i'm using not so current , current 5.4.12.

SO my PC has uefi firmaware , i have a 100mb EFI partition of file type EF00. However secure boot is turned off; it states in the logs or somewhere on slackware.com by My V that slackware can not as yet work with secure boot ,but it can use elilo, gpt and efi if that makes sense

Also i did read iso2usb will work if you used the full monty live, but will last time i read work if you used the slim xfce live it wont work

I did try the latest iso, but it wouldn't boot. (I had UEFI turned on. In hindsight, I didn't turn on legacy BIOS mode and try.) When it wouldn't boot, I grabbed Alien Bob's liveslak, because his stuff always works.

Secure Boot is off.

I did download the full install, not the xfce or slim one.

uefi is the firmware its a choice of "secure boot" enabled or disabled you have to look at .
Slackware won't work with secure boot enabled

found it read his under "but i want to use uefi" https://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/slackw...EADME_UEFI.TXT

Yeah. SecureBoot was disabled before I got it. (After Windows 10 was wiped and Ubuntu put on.) I wiped the disk again and put Slackware on. (I'm the 2nd owner. I have no idea how Ubuntu was set up before, but I do know that it wasn't in legacy bios mode for it.)

Check in the bios for other settings that might have something to do with this.
I had one system that had a windows7 or windows 8 choice in the bios that affected if a live slack would boot or not in uefi mode. Maybe you have something similar.
Disable fast-boot in bios if exist, check to see if there is an option to enable/disable usb boot in the bios

Check your system's Boot Order keystroke. Commonly most UEFI enabled BIOSes will display both options on bootable devices that have both. Select the UEFI entry if yours does and then run efibootmgr or whatever to embed an appropriate entry for Default.

Will check if there's a windows choice in the BIOS.

And the USB drive--even though it's got efi boot stuff on it--won't show in the boot order menu unless it's in legacy BIOS mode. (Used Alien Bob's liveslak image and his iso2usb script.)

https://www.dell.com/community/Lapto...y/td-p/4256923

https://www.dell.com/community/Inspi...P/td-p/7300670

yeah, looks like the official answer is "BIOS is wonky." If I need to get back in there, I'll try the battery drain method. If not, it ain't broke, as the saying goes, and Slackware-current is happily running on it. Pretty sweet laptop, otherwise.

I have that same laptop and never had issues booting bob's current iso in UEFI mode with secure boot off. It's been a while since I've had to play with it.. but yes I echo the sentiment that it's wonky.

It's a good laptop but nvidia optimus sucks.

I wish Xorg 1.21 would come out and make it into Slackware before 15 releases.. but I'm pessimistic. :/

I haven't tried to set up optimus yet. Pain in the arse?

Trying to fix BIOS things can be problematic, especially if everything else is working fine. I guess use it, and if I encounter problems, worry about it then. (God only knows what happened when Windows 10 was removed and Ubuntu installed. I'm not sure how that was done.)

Well assuming our laptops are the same the nvidia GPU is a GTX 960m. It's not directly connected to your display, only the intel GPU is. The nvidia GPU is accessed through some sort of frame buffer stuff managed in software (at least to my understanding).

I've read up a bunch of ways to deal with this. I could never get things like bumblebee to work. The best I could do was get either the Intel GPU working alone or the nvidia GPU working along side it but always active and consuming lots of power, destroying the battery life. Other issues persist like screen tearing that I could never do anything about.

Supposedly between modern versions of the binary nvidia drivers and changes that have been committed to Xorg for the 1.21 release these issues are sorted and you can just run a program with the prime command to get GPU switching to work properly like it does on Windows.. but as time goes on it seems less and less likely 1.21 will ever come with everybody jumping shop to Wayland. Some other distros like Ubuntu I think have their own methods baked into the distro to address this issue, but screen tearing continued to be a problem.

Is it worth trying to get bumblebee or whatever working? I've just been using nouveau, or whatever the default is. Haven't tried gaming, since I can do that on my desktop.

I don't personally think it's worth the hassle. Depending on what kind of gaming you want to do the intel GPU is sufficient. I mostly just played Diablo 1, classic Doom and Quake, emulators for old game consoles when I ran linux on this laptop.