Installation on EFI-requiring hardware requires expert intervention
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| debian-installer (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
This issue is based on my experience installing onto an iMac, which absolutely requires EFI boot. I don't know how well this applies to the broader world of "PCs", I believe some of these either require EFI too, or at least by default have it set in the firmware settings to require it.
I apologise if I'm not entirely aware of the EFI capabilities (if any) of the installer, I'm just going from my personal experience trying to install in a normal way.
Launching the installer from a USB stick was no problem.
At the end of the installer it asks (I'm going from memory) about where to install the grub bootloader.
However (unless I am misunderstanding something), this is never going to work for an EFI-only machine. So it's leading the user down a path that will not work for them, and not providing the path they do need.
What the installer should ideally do is ideally detect which machines require EFI - or failing that, just provide an EFI option with some advice. The EFI option would install rEFInd automatically, instead of Grub. Even better is if it could even detect all available FAT partitions and ask which to install EFI to (with detection what the current EFI partition is, for the default).
| Chris Graham (chrisgraham) wrote | #1 |
As a side-note, ideally the installer would be enough also to detect what filesystems are compatible with rEFInd, and give an error if you select them for installation. For example, XFS is not compatible with rEFInd. This implies the EFI detection/question would need to be presented before the partitioning step.