[mdlug] UEFI and other modern problems

[Ingles, Raymond]

My mother and father are, thankfully, mostly switched over to Linux. My mother boots into Windows for an old greeting-card program that doesn't work well under Wine. But the machine they have is getting a little old - it's an AMD-64 machine with 1GB of RAM. Decent, but my dad's looking to play a few more recent games and they have some money so they commissioned me to find a new machine for them.

I don't have time to build a new machine from scratch anymore, so I did a little research and got a deal on a decent Dell Inspiron 3000 machine. Intel Core I5 4th gen, 8GB RAM, the latest Intel graphics. I've confirmed it'll run current games well enough, the Intel graphics chips have solid Linux support (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=massive_linux_gpus), and next year when I upgrade my video card I'll bump up the power supply in theirs and give them my old card, which I *know* works with Linux.

I'm leaving the Windows 8.1 it came with on there - with a couple tweaks, of course. (http://www.classicshell.net/ , http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-boot-directly-to-the-desktop-in-windows-8-1/) That'll do for Windows-only games. Of course, with Steam on Linux a whole lotta games are available on Linux, too.

But I've been using Xubuntu for myself and them. Simple, lower-resource-hogging, familiar, and runs all the stuff that runs on Ubuntu. But the install confused me for a bit. What with the new PC firmware standard UEFI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface) replacing the old BIOS and this Secure Boot crud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Secure_boot_criticism) , I had to go Googling.

I stuck in an extra SATA drive next to the Windows one, and when I ran the LiveCD, it didn't seem to see the Windows 8.1 system. The install routine didn't offer me the option to 'install alongside an existing OS'. What I had to do was go into the custom partitioning, set up the new drive, and install there. Along the way, the Xubuntu install added its stuff to the special EFI partition on the original drive, and when the machine boots I can switch between Linux and Windows, as desired. Docs are here (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI) - apparently things have been dicey for a bit, but the process was smooth enough for me, aside from the need to do custom partitioning.

Anyway, long story short - UEFI takes some getting used to but I was able to install Xubuntu 14.04 without disabling UEFI or Secure Boot.

BTW, my wife's computer needed to be put down (burned-out USB ports and all). So now I've got 3GB of DDR2 RAM laying around (two 1GB sticks, two 512MB sticks). But that won't work in my parents' old computer (DDR) or my wife's work computer (DDR3). If anyone has some DDR or DDR3 RAM they'd like to trade, let me know...

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