nobugs wrote:Manjaro Linux, which is also a 64bit distro boots directly to a desktop bypassing the grub 2.00 menu. It must be UEFI enabled otherwise it would'nt boot. Expecting a similar grub menu.
I have no experience with Manjaro specifically; however, it's based on Arch, and the Arch developers have been using gummiboot rather than GRUB as a boot manager for EFI for the past several releases. The installer may well use a 0-second timeout to boot straight into the default entry, which would presumably be the installation medium.
LXLE and PearOS7 are both 64bit and they boot directly to Windows8. So would that mean they don't support UEFI and react like 32bit distros.
That or their EFI support is set up in a way that doesn't work on your particular computer. I've seen this sort of thing in the past, especially if people create USB boot media using third-party tools like unetbootin -- such tools often work fine for distributions A and B, but fail with distributions C and D, especially when C and D are unusual distributions.
As an aside, let me go down another road. After my first attempt to install Mint and rebooted, Windows diplayed it's own bootloader with Win8 and Linux displayed in large blue icons. Selecting Win8 worked fine obviously, but selecting Mint returned no operating system (I forget the wording).
For the sake of clarity, it may be less confusing to try to get linux working from this menu as it appears to be a native win app, rather than trying other work arounds. MS have been most gracious to provide a dual boot window, even if it doesn't work as presented, so would it be more logical to use this as a starting point. Particularly now that it has been established which linux OS's boot and which don't.
First, understand the difference between boot loaders and boot managers (please forgive me if you already know this; but a lot of people don't):
- Boot managers give the user the ability to select between one boot loader and another. Often, the boot loaders are given OS names for the sake of simplicity. Boot managers are basically user-interface tools, with a menu or prompt of some sort.
- Boot loaders load an OS kernel into memory and start it running. They may also load associated files (such as a Linux initial RAM disk) and pass options to the kernel. They often have no user interface elements, although sometimes they enable users to set boot options. They can be tied to booting a single OS kernel (like ELILO) or be able to boot multiple OSes (like GRUB).
Some programs, such as GRUB, combine both functions in one program. Others, such as rEFIt, rEFInd, and gummiboot, are boot managers exclusively. The kernel's built-in EFI stub loader, ELILO, and (on EFI) SYSLINUX are boot loaders only, although ELILO and SYSLINUX can both present a menu of Linux kernels. In almost all cases, boot managers and boot loaders are
not Windows, Linux, OS X, or other OS-level applications; they're firmware-level (EFI, BIOS, etc.) applications. Although they may be associated with one OS or another, it's important to remember that they operate on a pre-OS level. I don't know the details of Microsoft's EFI boot loader's capabilities. It's definitely a boot loader for Windows, and it may be a boot manager; but if it is a boot manager, I don't know how to configure it. I've never heard the claim that the Windows boot loader can load a Linux kernel directly, so if it can present a menu with a Linux option in it, the Windows boot loader is functioning as a boot manager, and some other boot loader must handle loading the Linux kernel. This is a critical detail that people often misunderstand: Whatever presents an OS-selection menu is the boot manager. It may or may not also be a boot loader, and in most cross-OS environments, at least one additional program must function as the boot loader. This method of operation creates additional opportunities for things to
not work, especially if you're creating an unusual setup and you don't understand all the pieces that it requires.
All of this comes to a point: Unless you have access to somebody who's
very knowledgeable about the Microsoft boot loader/manager, I strongly recommend against relying on it to handle a Linux/Windows dual-boot configuration. The reason is that I haven't seen reliable advice about handling it in Linux forums. Some people advise using EasyBCD for the job, but I have yet to see a single report from somebody who's gotten that to work on an EFI-based system. EasyBCD can help control the Windows boot manager on BIOS-based system, but its EFI support seems to be limited to nonexistent.
Linux users' knowledge of GRUB, rEFInd, and gummiboot, OTOH, is extensive, albeit not widespread. Many forum posters are still laboring under BIOS assumptions that don't apply to EFI, but some people (myself included) do understand EFI-mode booting of Linux using "Linux" boot managers. (They aren't really Linux programs, of course; they're EFI programs. They're designed with Linux in mind, though, and they ship with at least some Linux distributions.) Thus, if you stick with these programs as your primary boot managers, you'll be able to get help here. (The Arch forums also have several people who have a good understanding of these issues.) If you try to use the Microsoft boot loader/manager as your primary boot manager, though, you're likely to get little or no useful help on this or any other Linux forum. Certainly
I can't help you there; but as rEFInd's maintainer, I can give you the best help available for rEFInd.
Tried other usb sticks with other 64bit OS's and none would boot. Conclusion:- Mint and maybe Ubuntu are the only distro's with a workaround for EFI computers.
Installing to a USB flash drive is an iffy proposition; there are subtle differences between that and using a hard disk that can create problems.
If you're talking about using unetbootin or the like to create a bootable installation medium, it can get tricky, as I noted earlier. In most cases, you should use "dd" to create the bootable installation disk.
In my experience, Fedora is the Linux distribution with the best EFI support, by a fairly wide margin. OpenSUSE and Ubuntu both trail Fedora by a significant margin, and Mint trails Ubuntu. Until recently, Debian had no official EFI support, and I don't know enough about its current status to comment. Support is variable in more obscure distributions (Arch, ALT, etc.).
My options are to install a larger hdd in my old computer and continue to use that or perhaps try Android on this machine. It works perfectly on my old computer. I need a machine to do productive work, not a test bed to learn the nuts and bolts of dual booting. Sounds negative I know, but I've literally spent weeks on this and feeling pretty low at the moment. Still smiling though!
You might want to consider using a virtual machine (VirtualBox, etc.) rather than a dual-boot configuration. That's almost certain to be easier to set up and get working than a dual-boot, and you won't be risking your primary OS every time you want to try something new. One caveat: VirtualBox seems to forget the boot loader entries created by efibootmgr, so you must understand how to set up your boot loader to launch using the fallback filename of EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi. I don't know if other tools, like VMware, suffer from the same problem.
). When u get a chance could you check the touchpad to see if it holds over reboots. Would like to know if it's a quirk of the machine or a sofware bug in mint. Other than that and the backlight issue, the Acer is a nice machine, don't you think!
