Configuring an EFI System Partition on a new laptop

[jglen490]

UEFI is, in most cases, simple. The other part of the deal is GPT, also simple.

There is no benefit to avoiding UEFI and no benefit to avoiding setting up an ESP.

O.K., now back to the "in most cases". The only possible problem with using UEFI lies solely in how certain MB and laptop manufacturers choose to implement the firmware in UEFI. So if you have one of the UEFI problem children, you can still get there, but it will take more effort and more help.

The simple part is set the UEFI/BIOS to UEFI, disable Secure boot (not always necessary), set SATA drive management to AHCI. With you boot USB drive attached, set it to the first bootable drive. Save. Reboot. Follow the instructions. While you may end up there, never start with Legacy mode.

If you're dual booting with Windows - I'm sorry - make sure Fast boot is disabled, and hopefully Windows was installed with ESP so you can just add Linux boot files to the same ESP.

[Qqmike]

The only possible problem with using UEFI lies solely in how certain MB  and laptop manufacturers choose to implement the firmware in UEFI.

And ASUS is great. UEFI firmware is very easy to use. Your mouse is available to help you navigate the UEFI-BIOS menus on an ASUS board. ASUS support is great (online, help guides, videos).

Example: Updating UEFI-BIOS is easy as pie. In fact, I keep a UEFI firmware file on a flash drive in case my system goes south, which once it did (UEFI-BIOS was damaged after a power outage).
Here's how:
https://www.asus.com/microsite/2014/...compatibility/

Example of fine-tuning your ASUS board (e.g., for hot rodders, over-clockers, and others wanting things their way):
https://rog.asus.com/articles/usa/as...-tuning-guide/

[jglen490]

You are exactly right, Qqmike, and I'm not surprised . The thing is, there are a few problem children out there, but for the most part UEFI is a non-problem. But, some have a hard time understanding that, all they hear is the bad news. I've been running UEFI on my Gigabyte-based desktop PC for a couple of years, including a couple of fresh installs and a reorganization of my drives to an SSD with / and SWAP and an HDD with all of my /home. It's to the point where I don't even think about it anymore; it doesn't interfere, it doesn't ask me to bow down to some high priest on the U.S. West Coast, it just freakin' works. And GPT is a perfect match. And ESP is an absolute joy.

The only thing I ask of my computer is to be a rock solid, work when I ask it to, almost invisible partner. And in return, I don't beat on it with over-clocking magic and the like. Not being a gamer, I don't need much, and I have a found a great combination of a very quiet and cool case, a stable MB, good CPU, more than enough RAM, and a stable set of drives. I really like simple custom-made stuff that works together from firmware up to OS and applications.

[Qqmike]

I agree that people have made too much of having to get used to UEFI. In fact, it is conceptually very nice, clean, organized -- puts all the stuff in an ESP. Flexible -- you can have more than one ESP. And you can control much of it, at the user level, like making labels and using efibootmgr. I think the thing about all ubuntus getting the same label of "ubuntu" throws people off; and it is something that should be designed better, IMO. But, again, for example in my how-to's, there are at least two ways of working around it; and I believe jlittle has another way, as well.

In short: NBD!

[TwoFistedJustice]

Okay so I have the system up and running with uefi.

Now I'm getting a boot selection screen which I'd like to skip and just go straight into Kubunutu.

I'm guessing this is a GRUB menu I'm seeing?

If I want to use rEFInd do I just install it from Muon?

[jglen490]

Since UEFI is running, what does refind do that grub doesn't do? Just curious what the use case is.

[kubicle]

Since UEFI is running, what does refind do that grub doesn't do? Just curious what the use case is.

There are pros and cons for using either, you can start here if you need more info:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/7608...nstead-of-grub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...f_boot_loaders

IMO, the primary use case could be that refind can be considered more manageable with multiple different linux installations on the same machine.

[jglen490]

Fair enough, thank you.

[Don B. Cilly]

There are pros and cons for using either,

Never believe anything someone with a Moscow time-zone says. There are no cons to rEFInd.

Just kidding, obviously.
For me, the main pro is, it scans kernels at startup. No update-grub necessary. I have lots of distros installed. Takes ages.
And BTW, every time neon updates a kernel, it runs update-grub three times.
Also, with all my installs, I had managed to confuse grub2 to the point it was just refusing to work properly. rEFInd just up and did it.

The main con is, it scans kernels at startup. And it chooses to boot the "latest".
I mean, it boots the last OS used, but for that, if the kernel has been updated, it boots the "latest".
It chooses the latest based on the timestamp (I guess).
Now, lately neon has been updating the 4.15 kernels a lot. So, that gets updated, rEFInd sees it at "newer", boots that.
So when it updates older kernels, which I see because I update via CLI, I have to "touch" the good ones in /boot. It works, so no big deal, but for a user with no experience, it can be very confusing.

To this we may add that, as Kubicle says, for older installs, [/boot/efi was world-readable], the new default for newer installs is readable for root only (mounted with umask=0077 permissions mask in /etc/fstab). So refind.conf is not configurable except as root.

Now, Mr. Smith will probably fix that (like maybe putting it in a more accessible location) - I mean, my install is not that old, some three months or so - but for the moment...

[jglen490]

So refind chooses for you ...

And it does so based on the latest kernel ...

Not much better than grub

And finally, having the bootloader as a root-only process just makes all the sense in the world! Guess what's running during boot - it's not you

[TwoFistedJustice]

Never believe anything someone with a Moscow time-zone says. There are no cons to rEFInd. [ATTACH=CONFIG]8296[/ATTACH]

The main con is, it scans kernels at startup. And it chooses to boot the "latest".
I mean, it boots the last OS used, but for that, if the kernel has been updated, it boots the "latest".
It chooses the latest based on the timestamp (I guess).

You can actually change the default pretty easily. I figured it out and I don't know squat about Linux.

See my other thread on How to edit refind.conf, the most relevant part of that thread is post #5

rEFInd is written to be the opposite of a dumb program. It's really well done.

Once you figure out how to get into refind.conf, just read through it and prepare to be impressed.

[Don B. Cilly]

I have been through refind.conf quite a bit.
Which option would you suggest to change that, and how?

The closest one I can see is fold_linux_kernels, but I don't want/need to unfold them, and even then it wouldn't pre-select anything.
On the config web page, Mr. Smith suggests "(You can type, as root, touch /boot/vmlinuz-{whatever}, to make /boot/vmlinuz-{whatever} your default kernel in a directory.) " (which is what I figured out on my own some time ago).
I even made a user action in Krusader(root) that does it with a right-click.

[kubicle]

You can actually change the default pretty easily.

Do you mean the default OS to boot?
Because if I understand him correctly, Cilly is talking about which kernel to boot for a particular OS (and if you have several kernel trees installed, refind boots the one that was upgraded (modified) last...which is not necessarily from the latest kernel tree)

[Don B. Cilly]

Well, considering he just quoted me as saying:

I mean, it boots the last OS used, but for that, if the kernel has been updated, it boots the "latest".

... I assumed that's what he meant.

[TwoFistedJustice]

To set your favorite distro to boot automagically in rEFInd

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/configfile.html

See 'default_selection' about 60 % down the page inside Table 1: Global options in refind.conf

"Any string, which is matched against boot descriptions. Note that rEFInd matches substrings, so you don't need to specify the complete description string, just a unique substring. Thus, default_selection vmlinuz matches vmlinuz, boot\vmlinuz-4.8.0-22-generic, or any other string that includes vmlinuz. rEFInd stops searching when it finds the first match..."

"If you specify more than one or if the identifier contains a space, it must be in quotation marks. If more than one identifier is present, they must be specified as a comma-separated list, all within a single set of quotation marks."

In refind.conf the easy way to find it is to CTRL+F and search for "max_tags". The boot loader selection is the next section down from that.

At the bottom of the default_selection section you will see a bunch of commented out options. You can pick one of those. Or find out the exact string by which your preferred distro goes and by and add a line like this one:

default_selection your_favorite_distro_name_v_number_whateva

Then you set the timeout to -1 and BAM it should load your preferred OS without even stopping to tell you.

In my case I only have on OS installed so I just left default_selection alone and set the timeout to 3 (seconds)

You can also remove the little splash screen that displays at boot up.