ITWire

There are reports that the DVD download of openSUSE - which is all of nearly 4.2 gig - does support secure boot and can boot up on hardware that is certified for Windows 8. Other reports say that the two live CDs, KDE and GNOME, cannot boot up on such hardware.

There is no clear indication in the literature supplied that secure boot is supported. "GRUB2 is the default bootloader laying the foundation for booting from LVM and btrfs partitions as well as support for UEFI Secure Boot," is what it says.

Whether that means it is just laying the foundation for supporting secure boot, or already does so, is open to interpretation. Comment has been sought from SUSE.

But the release itself is worthy of some comment - especially since a lot of so-called reviews are already floating on the net, written by people who haven't even installed one version.

The release was put off from July and the obvious reason for that is the preparation for secure boot. Nothing else could have got in the way. For Novell, openSUSE is the testing ground, before changes go into the enterprise distributions, SLED and SLES.

Computers which are loaded with Windows 8 by OEMs will need to have a sticker certifying that they have a secure boot process enabled.

Such computers will have a replacement for the BIOS (basic input output system) called UEFI (United Extensible Firmware Interface).

In UEFI, it is possible to use cryptographic keys to check the operating system that is trying to boot on that machine.

The system firmware, in this case UEFI, can contain one or more signed keys and any executable that is not signed by these keys cannot boot on said system. Another set of keys - called Pkek - allows for communication between the operating system and the firmware.

An operating system with matching Pkek keys can add more keys to a whitelist - or a blacklist. In the latter case, any executable which has a key that is on the blacklist will not boot.