I’ve been very happy with Ubuntu for quite some time – moving through its various…

I've been very happy with Ubuntu for quite some time – moving through its various versions before settling on Xubuntu for my laptop because I loath Unity and Gnome was getting as bad, and Kubuntu seemed to have apps crashing on me every few minutes.

I got Xubuntu installed on a HP G7 dual boot with Win 7 with UEFI boot without any real problems so when we got a new laptop with Win 8 I thought this would be as easy.

Nope – I wasted hours trying to get things to work properly and it never did. 

There is this long standing belief that Linux is for geeks and its all command line and hacking of configuration files. This actually isn't true – the modern distros are very GUI friendly and the installation is slick…… well its not true until it comes to dual booting Windows 8 and Linux on UEFI hardware… How  do Canonical (and other distro companies) expect to get Joe Public to try Linux when to get it to work you have to do:

: We need to install boot-repair now. Ensure you're connected to the internet and then open a terminal and type the following commands:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair && sudo apt-get update

     sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

This should add the necessary repo, update, download and install boot-repair and then run it.

Step 9: In boot-repair, click 'Advanced Options', and then the 'Grub location' tab.

Step 10: You should see a separate /boot/efi partiton. Make sure the correct one is ticked and selected.

If you aren't sure which is your EFI partition, open another terminal and enter:

    sudo parted /dev/sda print

(assuming your drive is on sda of course)

You should see which is which on the list this creates.

Step 11: Click 'Apply' in boot-repair. It takes a while to complete the process, and partway through will give you some commands to remove and re-install GRUB. Follow the instructions to the letter until the process completes.

Step 12: Reboot, go back into the bios and change the bios mode back to UEFI. Save and exit and you should now find yourself with a GRUB menu within EFI.

Of course it might not work or if you are lucky it might work but your boot menu is a stupid length with all sorts of odd entries on it because there is a bug in grub2's os-prober whcih creates the wrong style (BIOS) chain boot entry

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1024383

This is a bug that is critical and has been open since July last year but has no-one assigned to it.

So you can turn off os-prober to eliminate the rogue entries in one of two ways:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true

or turn off executable bit
sudo chmod a-x /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober

and then re-run the update-grub process.
sudo update-grub
 

Seriously? You expect Joe Public to start manually adding repositories and running utilities from the command line, and then possibly editing configuration files just to get it to boot properly?   Isn't this just what you've all been saying you don't need to do to get Linux working nowadays…..