Fedora – Benjamin Kerensa

A Follow-up post is available here since this post has become viral and controversial some how

As I was preparing to head out to the Ubuntu Oregon Ocelot 11.10 Release Party the other night I received a e-mail from a LoCo member in Salem, Oregon who passed on this message and felt it was an important matter to begin discussing:

Recent articles regarding UEFI and Windows 8 suggest the problem of the former blocking Linux bootloader installation is a matter that will appear at the introduction of the latter. That is not the case. It is on Win 7 machines and blocking GRUB installation now.

My friend recently got an HP s5-1110 with Win 7 installed. UEFI has prevented the installation of GRUB on this machine. I could find no way in the BIOS to disable the feature and so far, as I work my way up the HP tech support ladder, I have found no HP techs who have a clue what I’m talking about.

Just a heads up and a possible topic for discussion at the party. Of course, if anyone has more information on this issue, I’d be glad to hear from you.

The next morning I began looking into UEFI more since I had not done a lot of research but did know it was discovered around the time Windows 8 Developer was released. Anyways Ubuntu has a Community Documentation Article that discusses some workarounds for the UEFI problem and I have personally been considering how greatly the UEFI problem could affect Linux Users. I think there is some positive discussion going on and brainstorming occurring that will allow the Linux community to find reliable workarounds and solutions before UEFI becomes a standard.

Apparently Dell has had UEFI laptops for a while so it is no surprise that a new HP laptop has UEFI by default although with HP doing quite a bit of stuff in the FOSS community I figured they might have provided better support for someone trying to install Linux. Hopefully some sort of legislation will pass that requires manufacturers to list that a certain device is only capable of running a certain OS out of the box and further the whole issue seems very anti-competitive.

Update on Situation as of 4:37 PM Today:

Disturbingly, there were no error messages at all. Neither the Kubuntu installer nor the Boot Repair disk I subsequently tried gave any indication of failure, but the boot partition remained untouched. (I found the Boot Repair disk recommended on the Ubuntu wiki. It is a nice GUI which calls various command line utilities to produce reports on the disk and, of course, grub-install to actually install the bootloader. I must assume that it is, ultimately, grub-install which is failing silently.) The BIOS did have an entry for UEFI, but choosing it produced no response at all.

At this point I have found no firmware updates for the system nor anyone at HP who even knows what UEFI is, much less if there is a way around it.

I’m sure we all appreciate your efforts getting the word out.

Netflix has over the past months been struggling in my opinion to figure out what its roadmap is and ultimately the company’s executives have made some poor decisions that have resulted in customer backlash.

With the recent news of Netflix spinning off its DVD service into a separate company I’m somewhat amazed their board of directors has not sent CEO Reed Hastings looking for a new job.

If Netflix is to continue to dominate it will without any doubt need to improve its decision making promise and also radically improve its Instant Streaming catalog to win back customers while luring new customers. I believe Netflix needs to become more social and they have made a step toward that approach in their Canada and Latin America markets. Netflix could easily have their lobbyists approach congress and adjust the weird law preventing Netflix customers from sharing their watching info with Facebook and Twitter and it is likely Netflix is already in talks with congress.

In addition to making Netflix more social which is the way all technology is heading I think Netflix could really win by adding more educational content to their instant catalog. For instance what if you could learn a language through Netflix or watch an Instructional video on Self Defense. Surely, Netflix can make efforts to acquire rights to stream such content and better yet why not add some more National Geographic and PBS content.

The hardest thing Netflix is going to have to overcome is convincing studios and networks that streaming is the future and that they need to be more open to continuing their contracts with Netflix.

In closing it would be nice to see Netflix show a little love to their likely millions of customers who use Linux on laptops or desktops by finishing their secretive native Linux application.