Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs [LWN.net]

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 15, 2012 23:36 UTC (Thu) by PaulWay (guest, #45600)
In reply to: Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs by alspnost
Parent article: Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

This to me proves that there's also a culture amongst motherboard manufacturers - either through fear or zeal - of going a bit further than the minimum requirements and actually making Windows-only computers.

Hopefully this will see more sales for companies like ZaReason or System76, who give you computers without this kind of crap built in.

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Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 16, 2012 0:43 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (8 responses)

Those companies typically resell someone else's hardware; they don't write their own BIOS.

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 16, 2012 1:06 UTC (Fri) by PaulWay (guest, #45600) [Link] (7 responses)

Yes, but OTOH they do test that their hardware works with Linux. I imagine they'd be sourcing a different BIOS or different motherboard if it exhibited the same restriction.

Have fun,

Paul

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 16, 2012 10:39 UTC (Fri) by Priscus (guest, #72409) [Link] (3 responses)

I looked at zaReason laptops some years back: it was Poulsbo for netbooks and nVidia for larger laptops. Not exactly the great Linux experience I heard so much about.
Lately, they sell you less Poulsbo, and more Optimus instead. Great...

I must confess I have been most bitterly disappointed in these so-called Linus-friendly laptops.
Where are the decent, FLOSS-friendly machines (preferably not crapola left-over hardware from 5 years ago)?

Linux friendly hardware vendors

Posted Nov 16, 2012 17:06 UTC (Fri) by scottt (subscriber, #5028) [Link]

Think Penguin claims to choose their components very carefully to only use chipsets supported by the mainline kernel. Unfortunately their laptop and desktop computers seems very outdated now.

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 16, 2012 17:49 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link] (1 responses)

I had a ZaReason TerraHD, and it was stock Atom+intel graphics, not Poulsbo at all. The luggable laptop has nvidia; there rest are Intel: http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/

> I looked at zaReason laptops some years back

So you didn't bother to look it up (takes about 30 seconds to do the same overview I did above) and instead went on vague, perhaps entirely incorrect memories from "some years back" and then compounded it with

> Lately, they sell you less Poulsbo, and more Optimus instead. Great...

completely incorrect and uninformed accusations.

> I must confess I have been most bitterly disappointed in these so-called Linus-friendly laptops.

They're not "linus-friendly" [sic]. They're linux pre-installed. You buy it, boot it up, enter in your new username and set your time zone and bob's your uncle.

This post brought to you by the System76 Gazelle I typed it on.

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 18, 2012 16:59 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

ZaReason did sell a netbook with poulsbo graphics for some time (back when that was more or less the only option outside the underclocked Celeron with a very hot and power-draining i945 IGP).

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 16, 2012 17:58 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link] (2 responses)

> they do test that their hardware works with Linux.

They not only do that, they pre-install Linux and support it on their hardware. System76's approach is to create a special driver to fix up any lingering bugs (on the Gazelle, it says that it's adding screen brightness hotkeys and the sdcard reader), so they only ship with Ubuntu. ZaReason's approach is to ship any Linux on their machines, so if the cardreader doesn't work they just won't advertise the cardreader. So you may get a bonus upgrade in a release or two when the cardreader support lands in your distro.

In practice, I think I prefer System76's approach. My Terra HD had a lid state detection issue (tracking it down with mjg59's help, it may have been an issue with the Intel driver, but Intel wasn't forthcoming with the docs necessary to get it fixed). Whereas so far my Sytem76 Gazelle has been perfect. Of course, this is also comparing a late-edition netbook to a full i7 laptop so there might well be a hardware quality issue innate to the respective ODM markets. As others have said, they don't build their own hardware. Neither does Dell or HP or Lenovo for that matter. Instead, they all buy parts from ODMs and assemble them to the final product. So they are susceptible to the underlying ODM market--they don't have the clout of Microsoft or Apple, particularly because people insist on buying Windows laptops and putting Windows on them.

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 16, 2012 21:39 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

The "problem" with System76's approach is what if (like me) you have an aversion to Debian (alikes)?

I'm not saying Ubuntu is a bad distro, but I've been a SuSE guy since (iirc) 5.4. It's what I support on friends' machines. And gentoo on my own machines now. My latest foray into the debian world was linux mint, which installed fine ... and then when I upgraded the system got trashed. Dunno what went wrong, couldn't fix it, and ended up overwriting it with SuSE ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 16, 2012 21:45 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link]

> The "problem" with System76's approach is what if (like me) you have an aversion to Debian (alikes)?

Of course. And you're still free to buy ZaReason instead.

The hardware still seems solid. I've booted Fedora off my old laptop's drive and it ran just fine, though it was in an external enclosure so I can't speak to its use as a full laptop.

Of course, ZaReason will support your Fedora or SuSE install if you'd prefer to go that route instead.