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UEFI secure boot locking out Linux users.

Microsoft are backing a Secure Boot system that will lock computers into running Windows 7 or 8 and this will prevent the installation of Linux/UNIX or any other free open source operating system. Microsoft can not secure their own operating system properly so they want to lock out other operating system vendors and force everyone to run Windows 8 on new machines. This is not a good thing for everyone as a lot of businesses are still running Windows XP after 10 years and they would not switch to Windows 8 for a long while after the release. This is only a brute force tactic to prevent installation of any open source operating systems and force everyone to run Windows. The average user would not mind this, they would applaud any measure like this to keep their computers more secure, the type of user who installs Norton 360 instead of using the free Microsoft security essentials and having a bit of common sense when it comes to safe and unsafe websites. Linux and UNIX are far more secure than Windows, only stupid Windows sheeple think that Windows is as safe as Microsoft claim it to be. Websites like mine are hosted on Linux due to the fact that it is much more reliable and has far less security issues than Windows and Google Android platforms.

The key issue here is that in order for a machine to be certified to be able to run Windows 8 it must ship with UEFI secure boot switched on to have a certified Windows 8 installation, and to earn the logo sticker that denotes that computer as being a certified Windows 8 computer. If the user tries to install BSD,Linux or any other free operating system other than the certified Windows 8 operating system the installation will not be able to continue as it will not be signed with the boot key that matches one of the keys burned into the ROM on the UEFI chipset. If an open source operating system had these keys, then anyone could get access to the keys, so it will only be available to the closed source Windows 8 operating system and no other operating system can be installed on a computer using UEFI. Windows 8 would have to be one hell of an operating system if it was the only one you could install on your computer, but I have a feeling the Metro interface will not fit in too well in a corporate setting. A lot of companies are still running Windows machines with Internet Explorer 6.0 and obviously would not be in a hurry to upgrade to Windows 8 with Internet Explorer 10 needed to run the Metro HTML5 widgets.

I do not know why you would only want to run Windows 8 on your machine, I am perfectly happy with Fedora 15 and the Gnome fallback desktop, as close to Gnome 2 as Gnome 3 can get these days. And instead of shutting down the machine every night I just use Suspend and put the machine to sleep and when I want to start it up I just press the power button and it comes back up in a couple of seconds. I wonder if Windows 8 will be able to do that. My uptime is 2 days, 3:52 even though I have suspended my machine every night. This is better than running the machine 24/7. There would be a backlash against this from lot of people if they were vendor locked into running a Windows operating system that is not as secure as Ubuntu or Linux Mint. But I installed Fedora because I had the DVD edition and I decided to give that a try. I installed it from the ISO using the Anaconda installer and that went very smoothly.

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