On 15/02/13 13:50, Rowan Berkeley wrote:
I managed to get back in touch with my luckless friend in Denmark. She said she was thinking of installing Windows 7 on the machine, which she thought would give her access to BIOS. I replied as below. Comments and corrections will be welcome, since after all I know very little.
I've been following this thread with interest. Last week, I took delivery of my new desktop from pcspecialist. It was my first experience of UEFI. As the ASUS motherboard is not intended for Windows specifically, it does allow access to the UEFI configuration screen by pressing the DEL key and it gives plenty of time for this to be done. Secure boot can be on or off, and it will try UEFI before using a legacy BIOS. Once I was told that my problem was due to the video driver and not the UEFI I found that Ubuntu would boot OK using the UEFI defaults.
My first install of 13.04 needed a LAN driver so I had to build the module. Two kernels later, and support for the LAN chipset is built in! Curiously, the video driver from AMD shows an 'Unsupported Hardware' message in the bottom right. 12.10 seems to offer the same proprietary driver, but doesn't come up with the message. However, 12.10 needs me to build the LAN module.
I guess that the only safe way forward is to purchase only equipment that is supplied with no OS or with Ubuntu pre-installed. pcspecialist inform me that all their MOBOs have the ability to turn off secure boot as far as they are aware.
Regards, Barry -- Barry Drake is a member of the the Ubuntu Advertising team. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
