On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 4:16 PM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> As it turns out, a colleague was able to install a different Linux distro on
> a UEFI secure boot motherboard, despite an initial failure, a distro that
> other respondents to the SL list did mention as supporting UEFI Secure Boot.
> There are certain peculiarities involved, including the use of a VFAT (MS
> format) partition. As it is likely that SL 7 will require the same
> mechanism(s) when it is released, I am presenting this information as
> probable preview of coming attractions (Linux base tends to be the same
> across many different distributions because of the difficulty of
> re-inventing the details of hardware support -- even if details of such
> things as anaconda versus other installers are quite different and
> incompatible). The below reference should be OpenSuSE 12.3 .
>
> From a colleague:
>
> Subject: suse 12.3 install
>
> Got it working on my UEFI system, required a re-install
>
> trick was -
>
> 1> ran their default disk allocation - gives you home partition, root
> partition, swap partition and (in my case) a 156 MB UEFI partition, which
> has to be formatted VFAT. When I tried to manually partition
> without knowing this, did not work - there was no way of forcing it to
> install a non-uefi bootloader on an uefi motherboard, or to do the uefi
> trick on a linux partition.

The VFAT partition is the EFI System Partition (ESP) and it's a
standard UEFI requirement (Apple has "extended" the specification for
it to be HFSplus).

The ESP holds the bootloader executable. It's mounted by default at
"/boot/efi" and it consists of an "EFI" directory with a subdirectory
for each installed OS/distribution.

On my Ubuntu laptop:

# ls /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/
grubx64.efi

Had I not turned off Secure Boot, I'd have "grubx64.efi.signed" there too.