Re: ThinkPad x121e [Intel's i3 CPU]
Originally Posted by
krzyh00
Originally Posted by
srs5694
A UEFI installation has some advantages over BIOS mode, but unfortunately, the Ubuntu installer's UEFI support is still weak -- at least, as of 11.04; things may have improved with the latest 11.10 beta).
Quick question: What are those advantages? I'm talking about installing on a laptop with NO PRE-INSTALLED SYSTEM WHATSOEVER.
Some of these are very minor and/or apply only to certain configurations; but what comes to mind is this:
- UEFI boots are usually a bit quicker than BIOS boots (by about 20 seconds, in my experience -- although that's based on an EFI-based Mac, and so might not be applicable to UEFI-based PCs).
- With Windows installed, UEFI enables use of GPT for the boot hard disk. GPT has its own set of advantages, the most important being support for over-2 TiB disks. GPT also lacks the primary/extended/logical partition distinction and is theoretically more robust against damage. If you don't want to install Windows, none of this applies, since Linux supports booting from GPT disks even on BIOS-based computers.
- UEFI's boot process uses boot loaders that are stored as ordinary files on a filesystem. In theory, this makes boot loader maintenance easier and makes co-existence of multiple boot loaders easier. In practice, the UEFI support in GRUB 2 and Ubuntu is poor enough to overpower this advantage at the moment, but once GRUB 2 and Ubuntu get it together, it'll swing the other way.
- UEFI provides a shell, the ability to run shell scripts, the ability to load drivers, and other features normally associated with an OS. At the moment, those features aren't used for much; but in time they could be. You might be able to write a shell script to heavily customize your boot process -- say, to detect which network your computer is on and to boot a different OS for each network.
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