Hiya
Well as I said in the last post, Kubuntu worked out of the box. It created the 100Mb Fat32 ESP and used Grub2 as the bootloader. Unfortunately, it blew up when a new kernel came in. I reinstalled, but, typing sudo su bothered me, and, having the Nvidia drivers preinstalled didn't give me the opportunity to use nouveau, so I replaced it with fedora 17.
I used the same partitioning with Fedora, making sure all the partitions were formatted, and, after shutting off SELinux, was able to get it to install in UEFI mode. Seems SELinux couldn't write file contexts to the Fat partition during install, even though it works fine now fully enabled. Fedora still uses grub legacy and during formatting, changed the FAT32 partition that the ESP resides on to a FAT16 format. I didn't even notice till I started looking closer as it works fine and accepts new kernels without error.
One curiosity though. It seems even though I formatted the hard drive completely. The UEFI bios is still listing the Kubuntu install as one of the options for boot. I still haven't found where this info is kept, that is, where it can be retrieved after a hard disk format. So, I'm still searching through documentation etc., trying to figure out how everything works before I move to install it permanently onto the SSD.
efibootmgr shows Kubuntu, as it has files in /sys/firmware/efi/vars/, but, how it retained the info is alluding me at present. Is the bios/cmos holding the information? Still not knowledgeable enough on UEFI to come up with an answer. Even though I've been through Rod's how-to's a couple of times. The next stop will be the Intel UEFI specs.
I still haven't had the time to try the Debian conversion install. Install in MBR, then convert to EFI. I'd like to learn everything that is happening first before I start experimenting.
BTW - Fedora's not using kernel stub support (legacy grub), I'm assuming Kubuntu was, since it was using Grub2. I'd like to take a look and see what difference that makes, if it makes any difference at all (as to what is kept in the config files). F18 already has stub support working (I'd like to try that also), but I'll let that cook for a while. Seems Fedora/Red Hat are considering registering a key for UEFI Secure Boot, and, that has a whole lot of people raging. The mechanism for UEFI and Secure boot have my attention at the moment. One tends to learn a bit when the devs are arguing about it.
BTW2 - I found out I can boot the siduction CD on this motherboard, so, I guess it can do legacy bios. The one strange thing happened though. Just booting the Live CD and then exiting changed the time on the motherboard to German time. That was odd huh?
