Want to use UEFI 2.x to load grub2-efi and then the kernel? This is /fairly/ simple if you're already booted with BIOS/CSM ( Read more... )

You are going to create a chroot on a VM host, then set up a PXE environment to net-boot the system. Let %CHROOT% be the chroot location on the host; %VM_NET_IP% be the IP address of the local VM network; %VM_NET_CIDR% be the CIDR of the local VM network; and %VM_NET_BRIDGE% be the name of the bridge that ties together the local VM network ( Read more... )

Make sure that /dev/disk0s1 is FAT formatted, has EFI grub installed in EFI/grub/, and its GPT partition type is EF00 (EFI System Partition).

# mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /mnt
# bless --mount /mnt --setBoot --file /mnt/EFI/grub/grub.efi
# umount /mnt

It's tinfoil hat time! Let's say you run Debian or Ubuntu, maintain your own package archive, and want to make it harder for someone to tamper with that archive and trick you into installing malicious packages. If you want to sign your Debian packages and apt archive, here's a quick guide to how you set this up. ( Read more... )

This is a rough script of what I did to build a powerpc cross compiler in Ubuntu 12.04. In theory it should work for just about any other machine type, though I wouldn't bet money on that. (FYI: They have armel packages in the repos for some reason...)

( Ugly code behind cut )

# sg_write_buffer -vvvvv -m 5 -I FIRMWARE_FILE /DISK/DEVICE

Meme time: Leave me a one-word comment about your day that starts with the third letter of your LJ username.

One of my basement computers has one of these Intel High-Definition Audio sound cards. There are 6 analog mini jacks on the back, 5 of which are outputs and 1 which is an input. The outputs are: stereo line out, stereo rear out, stereo side out, center, and subwoofer (LFE). Given that I have two ultra-quiet speaker zones in my house (rooms where ( Read more... )

I intend to ramble about the T10 data integrity enhancement standards that are beginning to appear in new hardware.

( Read more... )

Tonight I head into the horrible world of EFI GPT vs. MS-DOS MBR and all the insanity that is dealing with A**** and I** firmware design choices. All this to see if I could enable the emergency text console on my iMac, and also to test overriding bad BIOS choices to enable high-performance disk controllers.

( Read more )