In order to get its Linux distribution to run on the next generation of secured desktop computing hardware, the Fedora Project will obtain a digital signature from Microsoft, a developer from the project announced Wednesday.
“This isn’t an attractive solution, but it is a workable one,” wrote Matthew Garrett in a blog post on Wednesday. “We came to the conclusion that every other approach was unworkable.”
The next release of the open-source distribution, Fedora 18, due in November, will be the first version able to run on computers that use UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), which requires the operating system to furnish a digital key before it can be run by the machine.
With the growing adoption of UEFI among hardware developers — largely at the behest of Microsoft — the Fedora Project faced a number of alternatives, none of them completely satisfying, Garrett said.