i was working on a brand new 2013 laptop yesterday. i spent hours (no exaggeration) on this thing. and i had my first moment where i felt old and out of touch with the current technology. most notably all the UEFI stuff. it really made me miss the antiquated BIOS.

anyways, i wanted to load windows 8.1 on the laptop. mainly because i needed to repartition the drive to make room for linux. it seems very hypocritical that i would have anything to do with windows 8 since i loathe it, but i wanted a new OS for new hardware. and i’ve determined that i can live with windows 8 w/ classic shell installed and booting directly to the desktop. when you do this it’s easy to forget that the metro UI even exists. i take a similar approach with ubuntu by using gnome classic instead of the gnome3 UI or unity.

step #1
get into UEFI settings. this took me an eternity to figure out. i hit F2 on boot and every other key i could think of. i finally determined that if UEFI Secure Boot is enabled then you can only get to the UEFI settings from the installed OS. in windows 8 this involves holding down the Shift key while choosing to restart the computer. there’s also another method that involves digging through menus. once i got into the UEFI settings i disabled Secure Boot. i could then hit F2 to get into the settings without involving windows. i also noticed i had to hit F2 almost immediately when powering on the laptop.

step #2
figure out how to boot off install media. i was sitting around burning dvds for install media (and having some troubles with this as well) when i suddenly looked at the new laptop and realized it had no optical drive. i just took it for granted that everything came with optical drives. crap i thought…what am i going to do now? i looked around for USB optical drives and came up with nothing. then i started googling how to boot from USB media.

thankfully, for windows it was incredibly easy. download the windows 7 usb/dvd download tool (http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool). even though it’s named “windows 7…” it works fine with a windows 8.1 iso. the ubuntu equivalent is an ubuntu packaged named “usb-creator” which comes in qt and gtk versions. the ubuntu utility is also equally simple to use.

at this point i had my install media problem taken care of, but then i couldn’t figure out how to actually boot from the USB devices. i spent a long time researching this as well. in the UEFI settings there’s a UEFI Boot List Option and Add Boot Option. i found the Add Boot Option to be very cryptic and couldn’t find any useful info online for adding USB devices. i eventually gave in and changed the UEFI Boot List Option to Legacy. then bam! i suddenly had options for booting from CD/DVD, USB device and so on. what i find puzzling and frustrating is why are these basic tasks more difficult to accomplish in UEFI than they were in BIOS. i was able to alter the boot order accordingly and use F12 for a one time boot menu after this.

UEFI setting changes:
Secure Boot = Disabled
Boot List Option = Legacy
Intel Rapid Start Technology (Fast Boot) = Disabled

i ended up disabling Fast Boot because it was a recommendation on many linux forums, not because i was experiencing any actual issues with it.

so what do you lose for changing from UEFI boot mode to Legacy? essentially, you lose the ability to boot from a 2TB+ partition (which wasn’t even applicable in my case).

step #3
apparently, changing from a GPT disk to an MBR disk in the method that i did leaves behind stray GPT data that confuses some partitioning utilities like gparted. this reared its ugly head when i was in the middle of the ubuntu install (during the disk partitioning step). the ubuntu install saw the disk fine, but did not display the existing NTFS volume. i quit the install and did some research. i found that someone made a utility specifically for fixing this named FixParts (http://www.rodsbooks.com/fixparts/). i ran the windows version of the utility like so:
fixparts 0: (from administrator command prompt)

upon running fixparts i was initially presented with the message “NOTICE: GPT signatures detected on the disk…”. i entered yes to delete the GPT signatures and then quit the utility. that was all that needed to be done in my case.

step #4
install nvidia driver in ubuntu. the ubuntu install defaulted to the open source nouveau driver which was running fine. nonetheless, i preferred to have the full nvidia driver installed. for so long ubuntu has spoiled me with the simplicity of installing this driver (just install the package nvidia-current). this time however i received a black screen when starting my gnome sessions after installing the driver. i tried the usual tricks of reconfiguring X and so on. i didn’t have any luck and finally gave in and started researching online. it turns out if you have a modern laptop with the intel hd graphics + nvidia card combo, then you need to install the following packages:
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia (source: http://askubuntu.com/questions/372594/problem-with-installing-nvidia-display-drivers-on-ubuntu-13-10)

i was in good shape after installing bumblebee.

and lastly some tweaks i applied to…
ubuntu
installed kompozer from the packages here: http://linuxg.net/how-to-install-kompozer-on-ubuntu-13-04-12-10-12-04/

move window buttons to righthand side…this used to be done with gconf-editor but not in ubuntu 13.10. it’s done like so:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout ‘:minimize,maximize,close’
source: http://askubuntu.com/questions/370038/ubuntu-13-10-move-the-window-buttons-to-the-right

there seems to be some issues with newer intel centrino wireless-n cards (in my case the 7260) and the linux driver iwlwifi. it’s an annoying issue where your wireless connection suddenly drops to 1mbps (but actually it’s a lot less than this). file transfers/downloads are nearly impossible when this occurs.

sudo lshw -C network
*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: Wireless 7260
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
logical name: wlan0
version: 73
serial: fc:f8:ae:8b:67:f8
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet
physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi
driverversion=3.11.0-15-generic firmware=22.0.7.0 ip=192.168.1.30
latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn

the issue was resolved for ubuntu with the 2/6/2014 update named “Firmware for Linux kernel drivers”, which updates firmware version 22.0.7.0 to 22.1.7.0. prior to that update’s release, i was using the temporary workaround of running:
sudo rmmod iwlmvm
sudo rmmod iwlwifi
sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1

this essentially disables wireless-n capabilities and you are capped at wireless-g speeds. the connection was stable after applying this.

sources:
http://syntaxionist.rogerhub.com/intel-centrino-wireless-n-2200-ubuntu-1mbps-workaround.html
http://askubuntu.com/questions/119578/how-to-fix-slow-wireless-on-machines-with-intel-wireless-cards

windows 8.1
disable smartscreen filter in action center
info: http://www.howtogeek.com/75356/how-to-turn-off-or-disable-the-smartscreen-filter-in-windows-8/

also very cool that you can natively mount .iso files in windows 8.1 (maybe 8 too?) now.

and i am saddened that you apparently can’t run 16-bit apps under windows 8.1 64-bit…

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