[ANN] "World's first supercomputer tablet"

[Mark Wieder]

Roger-

Wednesday, November 9, 2011, 2:12:54 PM, you wrote:

> Andre, I think doomsday has already come.  At work, we configure laptops
> for our users. We often use opensource Live CDs to boot the machine  for
> whatever reasons like looking at the partition table, or just to see how
> the latest Ubuntu or Debian or RedHat distro performs on the latest and
> greatest Apple has to offer.  Well, we tried booting from every Linux we
> had a Live CD or DVD of, and NONE OF THEM would boot on the newest i7
> MacBook Pro. We tried 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and could never go past
> an error that seemed to point to the hard-drive controller.  I don't have
> the exact error at this moment, but it sure seemed like some kind of
> secure-boot mechanism was behind it all.  So, we installed Windows in a VM
> and gave it to the user.

Sounds like UEFI. Apple has shipped logic boards with UEFI for years,
but it's never been enabled before.

http://boingboing.net/2011/09/21/anti-malware-hardware-has-the-potential-to-make-it-illegal-and-impossible-to-choose-to-run-linux.html
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/making-uefi-secure-boot-work-with-open-platforms

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net