14 DAY TRIAL // James Bottomley, the director of The Linux Foundation, officially announced that a new UEFI secure boot system is now up for grabs for Linux users, which basically means that Ubuntu and the other distributions can also be used on Windows 8 computers.
While the new files are available for download separately, Bottomley also created a bootable mini-USB image to make it easier to run Linux.
“During testing Microsoft discovered that because of a bug in one of the UEFI platforms, it could be used to remove the platform key programmatically, which would rather subvert the UEFI security system. Until we can resolve this (we’ve now got the particular vendor in the loop), they declined to sign KeyTool.efi although you can, of course, authorize it by hash in the MOK variables if you want to run it,” Bottomley explained on his blog.
More information on the new UEFI secure boot system is available here, while previous details on the bootloader that’ll be integrated into Linux distributions can be found here.