Dual boot Linux on R4?

It can be done, you need to clear all partitions and set up windows first, then proceed to mount linux.

Some discussion over here on Linux / UEFI / SecureBoot

en.community.dell.com/.../20144598.aspx

I would be interested in hearing what your figure out.

Have you tried Ubuntu?

Luis, What disto are you using?  I haven’t had much success with fedora. I installed a separate 2G drive in my system just for Linux installations (the Win7x64 install is on the original 2 drive raid partition).  The problem seems to be the UEFI boot loader hack that Fedora implemented to get around Win8 certificate requirements. When I boot the Linux image (using F12 to select the Fedora installation) I just get a grub 0.97 loader screen…  The liveDVD will boot and runs without an issue..  I tried installing from the live/DVD and the install disk but I get the same result for both..  Another thing I’ve noticed – I have a bootable 16G USB that i built up to support installation of Win7 from the original distribution disk (DVD doesn’t have the RAID drivers installed in the boot image).. When I was setting up the USB boot image with raid drivers I noticed that the win7 install did not recognize the raid or the ‘standalone drive’ until the raid driver was installed which seems a bit strange as my other UEFI machines are able to recognize the drive arrays..  The only reason i mention this is that the grub loader doesn't seem to see the hardrives either (not that i'm a grub command line expert).. Tesla suggested Ubuntu -- not a big fan of the new Gnome interface so i've been using KDE spins -- may try Kbuntu  to see where that get's me.

First, yeah I missed UEFI that could be a big problem. Kubuntu/Ubuntu would be a great start on that; actually my answer was based on maybe using one of those two plataforms.

I've never actually tried it using UEFI, but It's as much as I could think of.

I tried, no luck either, returning computer

I have a working dual boot on my R4. What I did was shrink the windows partition from within windows (I shrank it to 500GB; the other 500 is for linux) so you don't have to wipe any partitions. I then proceeded to install Debian in the empty space (given that Ubuntu is more or less a user friendly version of Debian, the ubuntu version should be the same). Don't install grub, but reboot with the installer CD, choose the option for rescue and mount your installed linux partition to chroot into. Make a directory /boot/efi and mount /dev/sda1 (the UEFI FAT partition) on it as vfat. Make a directory /boot/efi/EFI/grub and then in /boot/ a symlink to this grub directory.

 Then install (apt-get install) efibootmgr and grub-efi-amd64. 

Then, to be able to boot windows as well, make a new file in /etc/grub.d, e.g.: 40_custom and add this:

menuentry "Windows 7 EFI chainloader" {
        search --fs-uuid --no-floppy --set=root DEAD-BEEF
        chainloader (${root})/efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}

replace DEAD-BEEF with the UUID you have for your EFI partition. You can find that by running the 'blkid' command.

I realize this is a bit of a quick explanation version, so if you are a less experienced linux user and need some more guidance on some steps: let me know and I'll try to elaborate a bit.

I have a working dual boot on my R4. What I did was shrink the windows partition from within windows (I shrank it to 500GB; the other 500 is for linux) so you don't have to wipe any partitions. I then proceeded to install Debian in the empty space (given that Ubuntu is more or less a user friendly version of Debian, the ubuntu version should be the same). Don't install grub, but reboot with the installer CD, choose the option for rescue and mount your installed linux partition to chroot into. Make a directory /boot/efi and mount /dev/sda1 (the UEFI FAT partition) on it as vfat. Make a directory /boot/efi/EFI/grub and then in /boot/ a symlink to this grub directory.    Then install (apt-get install) efibootmgr and grub-efi-amd64.    Then, to be able to boot windows as well, make a new file in /etc/grub.d, e.g.: 40_custom and add this:   menuentry "Windows 7 EFI chainloader" { search --fs-uuid --no-floppy --set=root DEAD-BEEF chainloader (${root})/efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi }

replace DEAD-BEEF with the UUID you have for your EFI partition. You can find that by running the 'blkid' command.

I realize this is a bit of a quick explanation version, so if you are a less experienced linux user and need some more guidance on some steps: let me know and I'll try to elaborate a bit.

On boot I get the Ubuntu loader and 10sec to pick the OS or it boots Ubuntu. I never tried it with UEFI on but I figured since it can be disabled then why bother with it.

What has me is you know somewhere down the line secure boot will not be allowed to be disabled. Watch and see.