I have Lenovo G50-45 Laptop and Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04.2 in dual boot in UEFI Secure Boot. I can disable Secure boot and would like to boot antiX-15-V_64-full.iso in UEFI but it is not working. I have downloaded the iso checked md5sum and it is ok. I have made a USB stick with dd command and it boots fine if I select Legacy mode in BIOS but I would like to make UEFI bootable USB stick.

I was excited to read on ditrowatch.com"Want to run live on a box with UEFI bootloader? antiX can do this" so I am sure I can.

Please help.

Kamalakar

MSI motherboard, use F11, boot menu, an be sure to select the USB setting with out EUFI in it. Or it will never boot.

You cannot boot a LiveUSB made with the dd command via UEFI. A LiveUSB made with Unetbootin should boot via UEFI just fine. I *think* the problem with the"dd" LiveUSB may be that it still has the iso9660 file system. You need to make a LiveUSB with a fat32 filesystem. An ext2/3/4 filesystem won't work either.

For UEFI-only booting, you just need to make a usb-stick with a fat-32 (vfat) filesystem and and simply copy the contents of the iso file onto the usb-stick. I use"cp -a" for this. It will complain about the antiX symlink but that's okay. It is not needed. I mount iso files from the command line with: There are just two more steps needed to make the UEFI LiveUSB so it can also legacy boot. If you use unetbootin to create a fat-32 LiveUSB then it will do that for you and it should boot both via UEFI and legacy. I can provide you the two steps if you want to do it yourself.

Please let us know how it works out.

BitJam wrote:You cannot boot a LiveUSB made with the dd command via UEFI. A LiveUSB made with Unetbootin should boot via UEFI just fine. I *think* the problem with the"dd" LiveUSB may be that it still has the iso9660 file system. You need to make a LiveUSB with a fat32 filesystem. An ext2/3/4 filesystem won't work either.

For UEFI-only booting, you just need to make a usb-stick with a fat-32 (vfat) filesystem and and simply copy the contents of the iso file onto the usb-stick. I use"cp -a" for this. It will complain about the antiX symlink but that's okay. It is not needed. I mount iso files from the command line with:

Code: Select all

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/iso
sudo mount -o loop,ro  antiX-15-V_64-full.iso /mnt/iso

There are just two more steps needed to make the UEFI LiveUSB so it can also legacy boot. If you use unetbootin to create a fat-32 LiveUSB then it will do that for you and it should boot both via UEFI and legacy. I can provide you the two steps if you want to do it yourself.

Please let us know how it works out.

I initially tried unetbbotin but it crashed while selecting the iso file. Then I mounted the iso as per your method and copied the contents of the iso and it works.

Can I make the same USB persistent?

Kamalakar

I'm glad it worked!

kagashe wrote:Can I make the same USB persistent?

Yes you can.

Choose the"Custom Boot (with menus)" entry from the grub2 bootloader. You should be presented with a series of text menus that mimic the Fn-key menus in our standard bootloader.

An alternative is to edit a grub2 entry when you are in the grub2 bootloader and add"persist=root!,home" (no quotes).

If you want to make permanent changes then edit /boot/grub/grub.conf on the LiveUSB. If you've booted the LiveUSB then that file shows up at /live/boot-dev/boot/grub/grub.conf.

You can also make changes to grub.conf to create an entry that will chainload Windows (but I haven't yet tried this myself).

The persistence files (rootfs and homfs) will get created for you the first time you boot with persistence enabled. I suggest you enable both forms of persistence (root and home). Unfortunately, the creation of homefs and rootfs on a fat32 file system is painfully slows. This is because fat32 does not support sparse files. It only takes a few seconds on ext2/3/4 but UEFI does not understand these filesystems.

If you want to get fancy then you can make 2 partitions on the UEFI LiveUSB. the first is a smaller fat32 partition that holds all the files *except* /antiX/linuxfs. Then make a 2nd larger partition using ext4 and put the /antiX/linuxfs file on that partition. (in an /antiX/ directory) If the linuxfs file is missing from the fat32 partition, we will find it on the ext4 partition and that is where will will also create the rootfs and homefs files. This arrangement can be a little confusing so you might just want to bite the bullet and use one single fat32 partition and be prepared to wait a few minutes for the rootfs and the homefs files to be created.

BitJam wrote:I'm glad it worked!

kagashe wrote:Can I make the same USB persistent?

Yes you can.

Choose the"Custom Boot (with menus)" entry from the grub2 bootloader. You should be presented with a series of text menus that mimic the Fn-key menus in our standard bootloader.

An alternative is to edit a grub2 entry when you are in the grub2 bootloader and add"persist=root!,home" (no quotes).

If you want to make permanent changes then edit /boot/grub/grub.conf on the LiveUSB. If you've booted the LiveUSB then that file shows up at /live/boot-dev/boot/grub/grub.conf.

You can also make changes to grub.conf to create an entry that will chainload Windows (but I haven't yet tried this myself).

The persistence files (rootfs and homfs) will get created for you the first time you boot with persistence enabled. I suggest you enable both forms of persistence (root and home). Unfortunately, the creation of homefs and rootfs on a fat32 file system is painfully slows. This is because fat32 does not support sparse files. It only takes a few seconds on ext2/3/4 but UEFI does not understand these filesystems.

If you want to get fancy then you can make 2 partitions on the UEFI LiveUSB. the first is a smaller fat32 partition that holds all the files *except* /antiX/linuxfs. Then make a 2nd larger partition using ext4 and put the /antiX/linuxfs file on that partition. (in an /antiX/ directory) If the linuxfs file is missing from the fat32 partition, we will find it on the ext4 partition and that is where will will also create the rootfs and homefs files. This arrangement can be a little confusing so you might just want to bite the bullet and use one single fat32 partition and be prepared to wait a few minutes for the rootfs and the homefs files to be created.

I will try all these things. I am Ubuntu user since last 10 years and have played with many other distributions including antiX. Since I purchased this Lenovo laptop I was waiting for stable antiX version with UEFI. After I copied the files from mounted iso I remembered that I did the same thing while in Windows 8.1 for Ubuntu 14.04.

By the way I have enabled secure boot and can boot with this antiX USB. It means it has signed Grub Bootloader, I am surprised!

Kamalakar