I recently installed Debian 12.8 on my laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad T430, Core i5, 16 GB RAM, original 300 GB hard disk) as dual boot alongside the Windows 10 that was on the machine when I got it several years ago. I installed "clean" -- overwriting the existing Kubuntu 22.04 -- and it took me five or six attempts with both the Debian KDE installer and the generic Debian web installer before I got a successful load.
What I found in that process was that I had to set the machine's BIOS to Secure Boot in order for the web installer, at least, to complete (I didn't think to try this when I was still trying to run the KDE-specific installer from the Live USB) -- and then had to switch it back, because the legacy Windows on that machine wasn't installed in Secure Boot mode (and I'm not quite 100% ready to remove that Windows; it's the only working Windows I have and the machine is very much not Win11 compatible).
Now, I'm soon to make the same change on my primary system, a legacy desktop machine that's been continuously upgraded since 80286, DOS 6 and Windows 3.0. The last significant hardware upgrade was (in 2016) installing an AMD Fx8350 and Gigabyte 970A-D3P motherboard (upgrades to my nVidia graphics have been smooth and seamless, and the same drivers ran my old GTx750 as run my current RTx2070, while increasing RAM from 16 GB to 32 GB is trivial in this context). While this machine has an old Windows XP on the old platter drive, that copy of Windows hasn't been bootable in some years, but because it's intermingled with old user files I don't have time to filter through, I haven't bothered to try to clean it up (adding more storage is cheaper than spending days digging through decade-old files). I don't know any reason I can't install in Secure Boot mode and just leave it at that, on this machine -- but I haven't had this in the past and I'm not 100% sure this old BIOS supports that.
Is there a reliable way to get the Debian 12.8 Web installer to run without Secure Boot? Or was it determined that there are no machines too old to have Secure Boot that can still run full-up Debian?
What I found in that process was that I had to set the machine's BIOS to Secure Boot in order for the web installer, at least, to complete (I didn't think to try this when I was still trying to run the KDE-specific installer from the Live USB) -- and then had to switch it back, because the legacy Windows on that machine wasn't installed in Secure Boot mode (and I'm not quite 100% ready to remove that Windows; it's the only working Windows I have and the machine is very much not Win11 compatible).
Now, I'm soon to make the same change on my primary system, a legacy desktop machine that's been continuously upgraded since 80286, DOS 6 and Windows 3.0. The last significant hardware upgrade was (in 2016) installing an AMD Fx8350 and Gigabyte 970A-D3P motherboard (upgrades to my nVidia graphics have been smooth and seamless, and the same drivers ran my old GTx750 as run my current RTx2070, while increasing RAM from 16 GB to 32 GB is trivial in this context). While this machine has an old Windows XP on the old platter drive, that copy of Windows hasn't been bootable in some years, but because it's intermingled with old user files I don't have time to filter through, I haven't bothered to try to clean it up (adding more storage is cheaper than spending days digging through decade-old files). I don't know any reason I can't install in Secure Boot mode and just leave it at that, on this machine -- but I haven't had this in the past and I'm not 100% sure this old BIOS supports that.
Is there a reliable way to get the Debian 12.8 Web installer to run without Secure Boot? Or was it determined that there are no machines too old to have Secure Boot that can still run full-up Debian?
Statistics: Posted by Silent Observer — 2024-12-28 14:41 — Replies 2 — Views 38