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Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

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Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#431

Post by tom_b »

CaptSpify wrote: post #430
SamBam wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This really makes me angry and makes me want to boycott their products. After SuperFish, Omniture, and whatever their third malware scandal was, you still need a reason not to buy Lenovo?

The problem I have is: What's the alternative? I've yet to see a decent linux-capable computer. I'm hoping someone can point me to one

I run Debian and XMonad on a Macbook Pro with 16GB of memory. Nice machine. I guess it would still dual boot to OSX, but I haven't tried for more than a year.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#432

Post by khedoros »

leereeves wrote: post #371
UK-AL wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres a difference between explicitly locking out linux, and using a piece of hardware that doesn't have linux driver.

According to a comment there, it's not hardware, it's a BIOS setting. > I've been able to successfully get past Lenovo's lock through direct bios flashing. I'm looking into better solutions, hopefully I can find a way to do this without an external programmer. I was going to keep people updated from the Lenovo forum, but as this is no longer an option I will keep people updated from here. https://www.reddit.com/r/lin…

Yes, but it's a setting that causes the hardware to behave differently, and which would need driver support to function.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#433

Post by soperj »

tom_b wrote: post #431
CaptSpify wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have is: What's the alternative? I've yet to see a decent linux-capable computer. I'm hoping someone can point me to one

I run Debian and XMonad on a Macbook Pro with 16GB of memory. Nice machine. I guess it would still dual boot to OSX, but I haven't tried for more than a year.

Pay out the ass for 4 year old hardware?

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#434

Post by Sylos »

StreamBright wrote: post #219

I like these catchy titles. How long is this going to last? We have hackers who can crack iPhone pin codes designed to be secure and make hacking impossible. I guess we see a new BIOS that can enable Linux installations within a month.

Someone already managed to break it. If I understood it correctly by somehow overwriting the ROM. That's not the point, though, as others have already said.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#435

Post by krylon »

vanderZwan wrote: post #288

This looks like a timely moment to bring up Cory Doctorow's The coming war on general computation talk: > So today we have marketing departments who say things like "we don't need computers, we need... appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that…

That talk is so awesome. I still watch it about once a year, just because it is so much fun to listen to.

It is also slightly depressing in how right he is - back then I thought the guy was sounding kind of paranoid, but with every passing year and every new wave of hype (the cloud(TM), IoT, "Industrie 4.0", ...), and with every case of stuff like Superfish, I think of that talk and cannot help thinking that he was right all along. (It is a lot of fun to listen to, though, Doctorow is a great speaker!)

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#436

Post by chirau »

soperj wrote: post #433
tom_b wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run Debian and XMonad on a Macbook Pro with 16GB of memory. Nice machine. I guess it would still dual boot to OSX, but I haven't tried for more than a year.

Pay out the ass for 4 year old hardware?

So you would rather pay out the ass for the latest hardware... even if it does not allow you to install Linux?

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#437

Post by tom_b »

soperj wrote: post #433
tom_b wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run Debian and XMonad on a Macbook Pro with 16GB of memory. Nice machine. I guess it would still dual boot to OSX, but I haven't tried for more than a year.

Pay out the ass for 4 year old hardware?

No, not really. When my purchase was made, the Macbook Pro had the nicest screen and form factor with 16GB of memory.

I debated the Carbon X1 at the time, but I recall it was limited to 8GB of memory. I regularly work with Java-based ETL tools and datasets that spill out of 8GB, so having 16GB was important. I could have gotten more memory if I wanted a bigger form factor but I really didn't want to lug a "workstation replacement" around.

A couple of years ago I said if the Macbook lasted as long as my Thinkpad X200 did (4-5 years), it would be a reasonable purchase.

If I was buying today, I might just buy some type of large screen Chromebook and do everything on some cloud VM instance with even more memory.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#438

Post by criddell »

fl0wenol wrote: post #429
criddell wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that include your cable company DVR, your PS4, your doorbell, your wifi-enabled refrigerator, your thermostat, and the 50 other devices in your home that contain (or are) computers?

Personal computers are perceived as the last vestige of this sort of freedom in a consumer product, hence the outrage. None of those other examples are sold with the intention of the user changing the system in a way unexpected by the vendor. PCs are supposed to be open-ended, and for this you typically pay more for the hardware capability than a product which serves as a gateway into a walled-garden ecosystem (phone…

I guess Lenovo should make it clear if the computer is locked or not and maybe offer an upgrade option to get it unlocked.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#439

Post by khedoros »

RandomOpinion wrote: post #354
xg15 wrote: post #47

The other HN thread suggests this not actually a dark conspiracy by Microsoft but simply a case of missing linux drivers for the storage devices. This sounds believable to me. But I'll put my tinfoil hat on just for fun and pretend it was an intentional move. Could this make sense as a new twist on the old strategy, making it "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend"? With the WSL, they made it theoretically possible to run Linu…

>locking existing users out of Linux A serious question: What gives Linux users the right to expect that Linux will run on any given PC / laptop? Think about it. These PCs/laptops are designed to adhere to Microsoft's Windows PC hardware standards doc (which was never, ever an open standard) and, with few exceptions, only tested against various versions of Windows. Linux users are failing to receive a feature that th…

The laptop supports a Linux-compatible option, and effort was expended specifically to disable that option. If some hardware isn't supported by Linux drivers, that's understandable. If software is added to restrict the modes that the hardware is allowed to operate in, and the restriction wasn't disclosed at the time of sale, I'll return the hardware, because the product doesn't match what I thought I was buying.

If I buy some hardware, I've done research on whether all of its chipsets and devices have Linux driver support just as a matter of course, because I don't expect that Linux will run on every PC. But I feel like I have a right to know if a company puts a non-standard artificial restriction on their hardware. Apparently in this case, Windows 10 doesn't even have the driver included by default, so I can't even reload the software that the machine was designed to run, on my own. That sounds like a defect in the product, to me.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#440

Post by rch »

CaptSpify wrote: post #430
SamBam wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This really makes me angry and makes me want to boycott their products. After SuperFish, Omniture, and whatever their third malware scandal was, you still need a reason not to buy Lenovo?

The problem I have is: What's the alternative? I've yet to see a decent linux-capable computer. I'm hoping someone can point me to one

Someone pointed me to the Dell XPS 15 yesterday (i7, 32GB, 1TB SSD, 4K touch screen).

Dell's business practices were a big contributor to the current situation, but I'm getting close to overlooking that.

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