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My new ultrabook (an Asus UX32VD) requires UEFI in order to boot from the internal harddisk. I use an LVM partition which contains my root fs and dual-boot Windows 8. I somehow managed to get this working on Sabayon Linux, however the overall process was pretty painful, and system upgrades keep breaking my configuration because everything depends on a hand-configured kernel and a hand-crafted GRUB2 configuration.
This causes a lot of hassle and distractions for me, so I am considering to switch to a different distribution. However, I cannot find any concrete resources that precisely document the state of UEFI support in the popular distributions.
As an example, the length of the Ubuntu wiki page on UEFI suggests that installing on UEFI systems is a non-trivial process, and this AskUbuntu thread on encrypted LVM on UEFI systems suggests that LVM might also be a problem.
I know that this question seems somewhat open-ended, so I'll formulate concrete questions:
- Are there any Linux distributions with an installer that supports installing to an LVM root in a UEFI boot setting where Windows 8 is dual-booted?
- Which distributions support UEFI without having to jump through hoops in order to bootstrap into a UEFI-booted system or requiring manual configuration of the boot manager?
Thanks for the extensive background information and especially the pointer to rEFInd. I think I'll give this one a shot first (and maybe rescope this question as "how do I make UEFI booting linux not suck"). I have SecureBoot disabled anyway - the machine even came with it disabled despite being pre-installed with Windows 8. I don't intend to enable it either - booting only signed OSs is not going to make my box safer if I'm using this to boot into Windows some of the time... – Jannik Jochem – 2013-01-30T16:48:58.640