12.01.12

New Reports Show How Microsoft Rendered New Hardware Linux-hostile Out of the Box Using UEFI Demands

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista 8 at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: GNU and Linux proponent have an unhappy Xmas because their new machines come with barriers to Linux booting — barriers that the vast majority of users would be unable to get around

THE nightmare which is UEFI is only starting to rear its ugly head now that PCs with Vista 8 are being sold, sometimes to people who do not want Vista 8. Microsoft is trying to bake its software into motherboards, just as it already does with hard drives (many come with NTFS, e.g. Seagate). Why are so many people forced to pay for something they don’t want and many people dislike. Where are antitrust regulators? These are patent baits, too. They help spread patents as part of the ‘standard’.

The “Goodbye Microsoft” Web site has this to say about UEFI:

If you’ve bought a new PC lately, it probably came equipped with something called “Secure Boot.” Secure Boot is basically a feature which prevents you from running anything but Windows on the PC. That’s not its official reason, but that’s the practical effect.

Diego Elio Pettenò from Gentoo shows how difficult it is to get past the retarded hardware Microsoft has been breeding. Read his post to see the technical complexity:

Last Friday (Black Friday, since I was in the US this year), I ended up buying for myself an early birthday present; I finally got the ZenBook UX31A that I was looking at since September, after seeing the older model being used by J-B of VLC fame. Today it arrived, and I decided to go the easy route: I already prepared a DVD with Sabayon, and after updating the “BIOS” from Windows (since you never know), I wiped it out and installed the new OS on it. Which couldn’t be booted.

Now before you run around screaming “conspiracy”, I ask you to watch Jo’s video (Jo did you really not have anything with a better capture? My old Nikon P50 had a better iris!) and notice that Secure Boot over there works just fine. Other than that, this “ultrabook” is not using SecureBoot because it’s not certified for Windows 8 anyway.

The problem is not that it requires Secure Boot or anything like that but much more simply, it has no legacy boot. Which is what I’m using on the other laptop (the Latitude E6510), since my first attempt at using EFI for booting failed badly. Anyway this simply meant that I had to figure out how to get this to boot.

Microsoft has been adding a layer of complexity that only Linux veterans are well equipped to deal with when things do not go smoothly or when making hardware purchases. Watch what J.A. Watson, an excellent blogger, found:

The good news was that I checked the specifications very carefully, and there was no mention of “UEFI” or “Secure Boot” or “Made for Windows 8″, so at least I shouldn’t have to fight with that yet.

[...]

Then came the next bad news. This system does indeed have UEFI Secure Boot. Grrr. I don’t know if it would have made a difference in my purchase decision if I had known this, but it might have, and in any case I would prefer to have been forewarned. Microsoft might think they can tighten the noose around user’s necks by imposing this mis-feature, but I refuse to play along.

As it was, I went into BIOS setup (on HP this means press F10 during boot), found the Boot option settings, and changed Legacy Boot to Enabled. That got it to the point where I could go to a boot selection menu (press F9 during boot), and then select a USB thumb drive with a Linux Live distribution to boot. I subsequently learned that there is still some limitation that I don’t quite understand yet in the booting. I am able to install pretty much any distribution I want, but at the moment it only boots successfully from Fedora (either 17 or 18 Alpha/Beta). I’ll go back and figure the rest of that out later, but for the moment I want to get this thing working, so booting the brand-new Fedora 18 Beta release is fine with me, and I can boot whatever other Linux distributions I want from the F18 Grub2 bootloader.

This should not be so difficult. Over ninety percent of people would struggle and abort plans of moving to BSD or Linux. These are the people Microsoft hopes to make stuck because Vista 8 is terrible. Antitrust is the only solution now. █

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Biased, Microsoft-leaning Reports

Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 12:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Reports on Windows from Microsoft-friendly sources help deceive the public

OUR observations regarding Vista 8 go as far back as early 2009 when Microsoft started shaping perceptions about it. Some people used early builds of the system as early as last year, but these were obviously Microsoft partners or boosters. Just to be able to run it so early one must be carefully selected. Microsoft gives no access to those who might be critical. David Gewirtz, occasional GNU/Linux basher in ZDNet, neglects to account for this selection process when he approaches Windows fans (testers) for the most part to gather their views on Vista 8 and thereby jump to the false conclusion that long-term use makes it acceptable. This is not only bias by design but also by intent, knowing the author’s past convictions. So why are those people so desperate that they set up faux surveys? Well, Vista 8 is not just doing poorly; it is doing nothing.

Microsoft-friendly firms show that Vista 8 is an utter failure by releasing numbers that include channel stuffing:

U.S. notebook and desktop sales down 21% in Windows 8′s first month, says NPD, showing the new OS hasn’t moved the meter

Another report says “Microsoft Corp.’s new Windows 8 has not given a boost to U.S. sales of PCs and tablet computers, according to the NPD Group.”

The decline is real, but NPD should also deduct channel stuffing. The reality is worse than the above and Microsoft is lying

Those who know better are moving to UNIX and Linux; the rest, those whom Microsoft controls, suffer the consequences:

The laptops issued to students in the Lake Washington School District were supposed to accelerate learning, but now a nasty computer virus spreading everywhere is disrupting class and costing the district money.

The district has spent more than one month fighting off something called the Goblin virus. It comes from downloaded malware via the internet and spreads easily from computer to computer.

The virus is affecting not only high school and middle school students who received a laptop for the first time this year, but also devices at the district office and elementary schools.

As the Microsoft boosters point out, this is Microsoft’s back yard where Microsoft bias manifests itself in the political system too (systemic corruption). █

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