[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.
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howtos:installing_on_uefi_hardware [2012/09/18 21:43 (UTC)] – [Creating your own install media] ruario | howtos:installing_on_uefi_hardware [2012/09/26 02:32 (UTC)] (current) – deleted page - moved to howtos:slackware_admin section mfillpot | ||
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- | <!-- Add your text below. We strongly advise to start with a Headline (see button bar above). --> | ||
- | ====== Getting the Slackware installation environment running on UEFI-based hardware ====== | ||
- | Some modern computers have started to offer motherboards that use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) as a replacement for the traditional BIOS. Slackware is perfectly capable or running on such machines, albeit with the provisos that the official install media cannot be booted via UEFI directly and no UEFI bootloader is provided as part of the official selection of packages. | ||
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- | Installing Slackware on a UEFI based machine, will require one of three approaches: | ||
- | |||
- | * Enabling legacy BIOS support | ||
- | * Creating your own install media and booting from this | ||
- | * Using another distro' | ||
- | |||
- | ===== Legacy BIOS support ===== | ||
- | |||
- | The majority of new UEFI-based machines have options to simulate a traditional BIOS. This is often referred to Legacy BIOS support. If your machine supports this it should be your first choice, as once enabled you can continue to install Slackware as you have always done, using the official install media and setup instructions. How you enable this mode varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. Refer to your vendor' | ||
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- | ===== Creating your own install media ===== | ||
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- | The easiest way to make your own Slackware UEFI-capable install media is to create a USB boot disk. To do so you may need to use a second machine. Alternatively you can use the target machine directly if it has another OS installed that provides a GPT (GUID Partition Table) capable partitioning tool or you have UEFI-capable Live media (CD, DVD, USB, etc.) provided by another Linux distro, which includes such a utility. Suitable partitioning tools include GPT fdisk (a.k.a gdisk) and GNU parted, both of which are provided by recent versions of Slackware. | ||
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- | The USB disk you are going to use as install media will need to be partitioned with a GPT scheme. It will need to have a UEFI System Partition as a bare minimum. This system partition is used by UEFI to hold a UEFI-capable bootloader(s) and configuration file(s), along with one or more kernels. The system partition must use a FAT32 filesystem (or it can be HFS+ if your machine is using Apple-based hardware) and must be big enough to hold the Slackware install media' | ||
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- | Once the system partition has been created add a ./EFI/BOOT/ directory structure to this partition, into which you place an EFI-capable bootloader, which should be named BOOTX64.EFI if your PC is x86_64 capable. This exact naming (./ | ||
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- | Whilst you can use any EFI-capable bootloader, it is recommend that you use Elilo. Elilo is very simple to use and configure, it is reliable and works in a similar manor to Lilo. As such it should feel familiar to most Slackware users, given that Lilo is Slackware' | ||
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- | Into the same directory on your system partition (./ | ||
- | |||
- | < | ||
- | prompt | ||
- | timeout=50 | ||
- | default=install | ||
- | |||
- | image=bzImage | ||
- | label=install | ||
- | initrd=initrd.img | ||
- | append=" | ||
- | </ | ||
- | |||
- | You should now have a USB disk that you can boot from, though you may need to configure your UEFI to consider this the first boot disk (refer to your manufacturer' | ||
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- | In addition to the system partition you may wish to have a second partition that holds the rest of the Slackware installation files. This can be formatted with any filesystem supported by the the huge.s kernel. This partition can be mounted after you have booted from your install media and used as a source of packages during installation. Alternatively you can insert an official Slackware CD or DVD once setup is up and running, or perform a network installation. | ||
- | |||
- | ===== Bootstrap the Slackware installation environment via another distro' | ||
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- | Making your own boot media is almost always preferable but if this does not suit you for some reason, you can often use the UEFI-capable install media from another distro. The steps are as follows: | ||
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- | * Boot the other distro' | ||
- | * Switch to a virtual terminal | ||
- | * Bring up the network if a connection is not already configured | ||
- | * Use wget or curl to fetch the initrd.img from the isolinux subdirectory of the Slackware version you wish to install, using a nearby mirror | ||
- | * Unpack initrd.img (using zcat and cpio) into a newly created directory (e.g. /Slackware) | ||
- | * Chroot into that directory (after first using mount to bind /dev, /sys and /proc from the host system and copying over / | ||
- | * Setup the $PATH and other variables needed to run the installer (by sourcing the chooted Slackware profile, i.e. ". / | ||
- | |||
- | ====== Tips on install when not using BIOS legacy mode ====== | ||
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- | Once you have the Slackware installation environment up and running, remember to use a GUID Partition Table rather than MBR Partitioning and include a suitable system partition on the primary local hard disk. During the setup phase you should skip Lilo configuration, | ||
- | |||
- | < | ||
- | prompt | ||
- | timeout=50 | ||
- | default=huge | ||
- | |||
- | image=bzImage | ||
- | label=huge | ||
- | read-only | ||
- | root=/ | ||
- | </ | ||
- | |||
- | After umounting and removing the install media you should now be able to reboot into your new Slackware install (you may need to change the boot order in your UEFI again if you adjusted it previously). | ||
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- | Finally, after booting into Slackware remember to configure an initrd for the generic kernel and copy both over to the local system partition. A further adjustment to the elilo.conf to account for this could look something like the following (assuming a 3.2.28 kernel): | ||
- | |||
- | < | ||
- | prompt | ||
- | timeout=50 | ||
- | default=generic | ||
- | |||
- | image=vmlinuz-generic-3.2.28 | ||
- | label=generic | ||
- | initrd=initrd.gz | ||
- | read-only | ||
- | root=/ | ||
- | |||
- | image=bzImage | ||
- | label=huge | ||
- | read-only | ||
- | root=/ | ||
- | </ | ||
- | |||
- | ====== Sources ====== | ||
- | <!-- If you are copying information from another source, then specify that source --> | ||
- | <!-- * Original source: [[http:// | ||
- | <!-- Authors are allowed to give credit to themselves! --> | ||
- | * Originally written by [[wiki: | ||
- | * Further UEFI Linux booting options: [[http:// | ||
- | <!-- * Contributions by [[wiki: | ||
- | <!-- Please do not modify anything below, except adding new tags.--> | ||
- | <!-- You must remove the tag-word " | ||
- | {{tag> |