If you are concerned about Micro$oft’$ plans for “Secure Booting”, or what our
community calls “Restricted Booting”, the Free Software Foundation has an
on-line petition at
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted-boot/statement.
If you want to be heard, please read the material on the site.
Larry
One can live without Windows computers. What about not buying them if they don’t do what you want?
On 2011-10-20 23:36, please try again wrote:
>
> lwfinger;2395512 Wrote:
>> If you want to be heard, please read the material on the site.
> One can live without Windows computers. What about not buying them if
> they don’t do what you want?
They can live without us, too. They will not even notice.
It means I will not be able to buy any computer.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
On 10/20/2011 04:36 PM, please try again wrote:
>
> lwfinger;2395512 Wrote:
>> If you want to be heard, please read the material on the site.
> One can live without Windows computers. What about not buying them if
> they don’t do what you want?
If the OEM does not allow deselecting the Secure Boot option in the BIOS, you
will never be able to boot Linux!! What computer will you buy?
It looks to me like the last (but logical) step of a long series of attempts by Microsoft to remain the only OS in the world, but it has never worked so far and I don’t think it’s going to work this time either. But to answer your question, if it became impossible to find motherboards and build systems with Linux and BSD, I would give up building computers and … I don’t know … maybe write books about operating systems history on a typewriter (if I can still buy an old Remington) or maybe just start to sleep at night. But I don’t think it will happen. I believe that Microsoft finest hours are over. Too many companies, schools, government agencies don’t want Windows for good reasons. Otherwise, Linux on Mac hardware works fine (the machine I’m using for posting in the forum most of the time is an iMac running openSUSE).
Somehow I don’t think that users like Mossad, MI6, CIA or SVR will take kindly to being controlled by Microsoft. I’m going to buy the cheap Taiwanese copy of those motherboards. If there is demand there will be supply. Human history is filled with failed attempts to control freedoms.
please try again wrote:
> Otherwise, Linux on Mac hardware works fine
I agree with most of what you wrote but Apple is if anything even more
precious than Microsoft about hardware lockout! If they have secure boot
available, you can bet they will use it.
I’m not sure. Why would they do that? They sold more computers after adopting Intel’s processor and making it easy to install Windows on their machines. Vista used to run better on Mac than on other hardware. I don’t think it is in Apple’s interest to prevent users from installing Linux on iMacs and MacBooks, all the more if it’s the only possibility left. I don’t think it is clever of Microsoft either, but they made so many mistakes in the past years than their marketing - which used to be their greatest strength - has become disastrous. Well, I’m not a specialist in commerce but it looks like Microsoft is not that relevant anymore. Restricted Booting won’t help them regaining market share but just make them losing more trials. And this is stupid because compared to Oracle - which appeared to be an even worse evil lately - Microsoft could almost have played the good guy and regained some sympathy - not in my eyes, but I know of many happy dual booters here who would experience some frustration.
I haven’t bought a computer since my first one, a Packard Bell with a 50MHz processor, with Windows for Workgroups 3.1x. I have only had 2 others since, which I built from components. The most recent being my, now less than state of the art, 1.8GHz CPU, 2GHz RAM with a 60GB HD for OS and a 1TB HD for Home.