We all know that Windows 8 PCs will come locked up tight Microsoft’s UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) secure boot on. This will prevent you from easily installing Linux or any other operating system, such as Windows 7 or XP, on a Windows 8 system. What we don’t know is exactly how original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s will be implementing UEFI, never mind secure boot, on these new machines. To address this problem, James Bottomley, chair of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board, has released a version of the Intel Tianocore UEFI boot image and some code that Linux programmers can use to get around Windows 8’s Secure Boot restrictions.
Intel Tianocore is an open-source image of Intel’s UEFI. Until recently this image didn’t have the Authenticode that Microsoft uses for Secure Boot (PDF Link) but now Tinocore includes this functionality as well.