Intro, UEFI, and Wheezy Installation

This is the beginning of my guide, it covers a short recap of my objectives, configuring a UEFI BIOS and installing Debian Wheezy Beta 1 as a Pure UEFI Bootloaded system.

Any Feedback and Questions are welcomed, if you want me to go into depth on any particular topics let me know.

Complete Guide Available on the Xen Wiki:

[wackmank]

Hi, I just stumbled on your video and it's great. I rarely find really techy project videos like this, so thanks! I've been using Linux for almost 20 years and I've been curious about Xen. I may give it a shot.

[movaxh]

I am using it for about 5 years (using zfs-fuse for my /home, projects, data, movies, everything essentially), Now I switched to zfs-on-linux last month, and so far ok. Very happy about it. Really love managment functions and some data safety features.. I am using it on 2 SSDs (mirror), and on 7 3TB drives (mirror+mirror+mirror, and 1 spare). I have Debian system alone on small LVM, side by side of ZFS.

I am just experimenting with UEFI and GPT, which make it a bit harder to setup. :)

[LordOfElm]

I have not had the time to update my guide, but I would recommend giving the Beta 4 installer a try. If you select UEFI from the boot options you can use the UEFI installer. When partitioning you can select EFI Partition from the list (instead of FAT32), and the CD will handle the grub installation.

[LordOfElm]

Just found Kali's documentation regarding their relationship with debian, and it is based on Wheezy. If it was the latest release version then the installer should have EFI support built-in, you will have two options when you select the boot device, select EFI and the efi-grub package should be installed properly without any extra fuss.

[LordOfElm]

I am a consumer my aim is a single machine for everything, and when I wrote the guide last year I intended to use Dom0 as a development environment, not just a Xen host. I chose debian because I am more familiar with it, but I'm sure any other distro would work if I had the time to learn their cruft. Pre-packaged xen distro's are mostly terrible due to lack of ability to modify, and VGA Passthrough requires modifications.

[LordOfElm]

meant for the last two comments to be a response to yours, this is to make sure you get a notice that a response was made.

[LordOfElm]

If the Factory/OEM install was traditional MBR you'd have to replace that with a GPT partition table schema, which will probably break the existing tables and wipe your Windows install.

If by some miracle you meet all the required criteria, shrink the Windows partition and when installing have Linux replace the existing UEFI bootloader with Grub. Grub can load Windows, but you will have to find another guide to show you how.

[eldersprig]

Thanks for info. Just thought you might want to keep Dom0 small and clean and do development in one of the Dom1-n, etc.

[jeromemoliere]

Hi,
thanks for your quick reply.Yes I never use Windows (I don't play anymore) but from time to time you are obliged to update your BIOS or do any other tricky task when you are a Linux user.My debian provides me a 99.999% tasks ratio.In fact being more accurate is how can I know what is the installation layout (secure boot or not, uefi or mbr ..) and how to deal with that while installing a new machine.
Kind regards

[LordOfElm]

No clue, if you are sharing the drive with Windows 8 it could be a number of issues, secureboot being the most annoying possibility, but if Windows 8 is using traditional MBR partition table then you may not be able to install an EFI grub. Either use a live DVD to check the partition table, or try installing linux with the traditional/legacy boot option. If secure boot is setup, then you may as well wipe the CMOS, toss out that hard drive, and get a new one.

[LordOfElm]

Assuming the same file structure then yes, manual booting is not (to my knowledge) specific to Debian. As of Debian Beta 3 support for EFI has been included on the install disk, making many of these steps unnecessary.

If the Kali installer does not have an on-disk EFI bootloader but it does have a Grub2 EFI package (or you are building grub from source) then I would think the process should be very similar. However, I have never used Kali before myself.

[LordOfElm]

I appreciate your suggestion, I may consider it if I ever get VGA passthrough working in a linux DomU, but until then it makes any development with graphical demands is very troublesome.

[LordOfElm]

@RainbowLogic, hmm I owned a Mac Core Duo years ago, but never tried loading it with debian. AFAIK Mac's use a custom EFI version of sorts. Some of the linux distributions include accomodations for that, but I've never tried Debian before.

Just to confirm, you grabbed the arm64 copy of debian wheezy, burned a CD or dd'd it to a USB drive, and when you hold alt/opt at boot time no disc shows up?

[LordOfElm]

The latest releases have built-in EFI functionality making my guide somewhat obsolete, however if you want to forgo EFI in favor of tradition MBR you will need to:

- Disable EFI Bootloader preference in your EFI/BIOS Configuration
- And/Or Select the MBR bootloader manually from your systems boot menu
- Use msdos partition tables, GPT is not compatible.

[LordOfElm]

I read up on ZFS, but decided not to try it. From what I've read it doesn't mix well with LVM, still has bugs on Linux, and some major features like de-duplication require a pretty sizable amount of memory. What are your thoughts using it so far?

[jeromemoliere]

Hi, thanks for this nice tutorial. I would like to know how to deal with UEFI and pre installed Windows .Modern laptops are sold with pre installed Windows and for me it's a good idea to leave a windows system to be able to achieve some clever tasks like BIOS updates.So how to make a Debian Wheezy + UEFI + Windows setup?
kind regards

[LordOfElm]

I have 3x 1TB WD Drives, and had a RAID5 in the mix originally. However as a software RAID 5 it performed horribly, I advise anyone looking to use RAID to get with 1 or 10 (certainly not 0). Raw drives perform at 130MB/s while the RAID 5 performed at 60-90~ MB/s. I have plans to test a 4x 3TB RAID 10 in the future, so when that happens I'll be sure to post some updates.

[LordOfElm]

If you are using Debian Wheezy they added UEFI support to their installers since Beta 3, rendering much of the instructions on my video unnecessary. If you are using Beta 3 or newer you can select UEFI DVD from your boot options.

As for that error, it sounds like the script is not recognizing the efi partition. Did you format it as FAT32, and is it mounted at /boot/efi?

[LordOfElm]

EFI is not the default, your BIOS will determine that, hence if you access your BIOS you can specify whether to use legacy as the default or EFI only. Worth noting that hardware varies, for example Mac computers have a special EFI version and no MBR fallback mode. If you want to share more details about your install process or hardware I might be able to get you better EFI instructions.

[eldersprig]

could have used alpine linux (xen version) as the Dom0. Dom0 is supposed to be light weight and not do to much but let you get to the various doms.