Gravis said:

> the first release will be almost the same as debian with the
> exception of packages needing systemd. after that i dont
> know but we would need hardware to test on to make any
> direct changes.

Hi Gravis. Yes, that's kind of what I figured. I'll do a little more
exploring on the Debian forum to see if someone has a suggested workaround,
but my current limited experience indicates that Debian is incompatible
with UEFI boot, even with secure boot disabled, and Debian is hardly unique
in this respect. For some people, that may be a show stopper, since
GPT-partitioned disks are now the norm when you buy a new computer.

Steve T said:

> I've heard anecdotes of the UEFI system writing to persistant memory on
> the motherboard in a way that an app misusing UEFI could brick the
> motherboard. Therefore, the only time I use UEFI is when I absolutely
> must have Windows on the laptop, and the Windows that came on the
> laptop requires UEFI.

Hi Steve. Thank you for raising this issue, as I hadn't heard about it
previously. If true, this could be a serious security threat. That makes me
wonder: do professional sysadmins (Note: I am not one) avoid GPT, and is
this the reason?

> Of course, your use case is dual booting with the Windows that came
> packaged with your laptop, and I think that might require UEFI. But
> pure Linux/BSD situations, consider doing what I do and using the
> ancient MBR system until UEFI becomes more solid.

Actually, I don't have Windows installed - I managed to buy a Toshiba
Satellite sans Windows. So at the moment I'm dual-booting only Ubuntu and
Slackware. However, my purpose in using UEFI/GPT on this machine was to
learn about it, because I do indeed get called upon by friends to set up
their computers with a Windows/Linux dual-boot. Until recently, I had no
trouble doing that, since I'm pretty familiar with the MBR system. However,
people are now bringing me new laptops with UEFI/GPT, and I'm at a loss as
to how it works. Thus, I'm now trying to master this new tech, and I was
rather surprised to find that Debian and PCLinuxOS both choked and died on
UEFI.

> On my desktop, what I do is have root (/) be a relatively small SSD
> that can maintain its full size with an MBR boot. That drive
> has /usr, /etc, and basically all of the OS that doesn't get written.
> Then I have a separate, huge disk, for changeable data, such as /home
> as one example, and I format that GPT (but it's not UEFI because it
> doesn't boot).

That's a good suggestion, and I'll keep it in mind if I switch over my
desktop, which at the moment is still partitioned with MBR. However, it
won't help with the laptop since I don't think it has space inside to
accomodate two drives.

Thanks again to all the people working on Devuan. I look forward to testing
the first alpha released as soon as it hits the servers.

cheers,
Robert