UEFI is a barrier to installation

[Kenny Strawn]

With Windows 8, it seems like Microsoft is just trying to get the antitrust lawyers riled up... not to mention being SO anticompetitive that they would have no compunctions about blocking ANY GPLed OS from running on a Windows 8 PC. Even Apple isn't that anticompetitive! However, there may be hope. The problem? We might have to take a clue from "man in the hypervisor" keylogger/Trojan writers.

So, I'm proposing a once-and-for-all way around this:

* Back up the ENTIRE UEFI volume to a raw disk image file (i.e. "os.system('dd if=/dev/sda of=uefi.img')" or the like)
* Erase the MBR with a brand-new GPT partition table
* Shrink the "uefi.img" file to fit the new partition size
* Create a new partition on the brand-new table that matches the size of the resized backup image
* Flash the resized image to the new partition, with GRUB and a more open EFI above it, such that the more open EFI acts as a hypervisor for the UEFI partition
* Create a new partition in the remaining space on the more open EFI image, and install Ubuntu on it

That way, we're the boss. By essentially "capturing" the whole UEFI OS by using a thin open source EFI hypervisor, the UEFI image would boot AFTER the open source EFI image, with obviously an open source boot manager to manage them. That would most certainly give Microsoft a run for its money.

ProblemType: Feature
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
TargetRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: ubiquity (not installed)
Uname: Linux 3.4.0 x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu9
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Jan 27 16:08:21 2013
InstallCmdLine: file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper only-ubiquity initrd=/casper/initrd.lz quiet splash --
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-04-26 (276 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120425)
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubiquity
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2013-01-17 (10 days ago)

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

This does not appear to be a bug report.