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Lenovo has confirmed that several of its Yoga laptops are refusing to install Linux-based operating systems. The Chinese firm said the issue had been caused by its switch to a new storage system, which reads and records data faster than normal.
There had been confusion after one of its employees posted that Linux was blocked because of an "agreement with Microsoft". However, Lenovo has denied enforcing a deliberate ban.
The restriction affects PCs sold with the "signature edition" of Windows 10. The term refers to a promise that "junk" software is not pre-installed alongside the OS to avoid slowing down its operation.
The Lenovo rep's response (linked to in the excerpt) seems to have been given before the company PR people got involved.
Hot Hardware , offers an alternative perspective:
Yesterday, Lenovo confirmed that Linux cannot be installed on the machine because there are no OS-specific drivers for the device's proprietary RAID configuration. Given that this machine has been designed to work with Windows 10, it should come as no surprise that Lenovo probably didn't want to devote too much of its resources to developing alternative drivers for this particular model.
To be more specific, Lenovo had this to say:
To support our Yoga products and our industry-leading 360-hinge design in the best way possible we have used a storage controller mode that is unfortunately not supported by Linux and as a result, does not allow Linux to be installed. Beyond the controller setup limitation, other advanced capabilities of the Yoga design would likely not work with current Linux offerings.
Lenovo does not intentionally block customers using other operating systems such as Linux on Yoga or any of its devices and is fully committed to providing Linux certifications and installation guidance on a wide range of suitable products.
In a statement provided to The Register , Lenovo further clarified its position on RAID support in Linux for the Yoga 900, writing, "Unsupported models will rely on Linux operating system vendors releasing new kernel and drivers to support features such as RAID on SSD."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @03:28AM
But storage? I can't remember the last time a GNU/Linux install didn't work with some kind of storage device. Heck, I don't think that's ever been a problem for me in the ~18 years of using it.
I remember when Linux didn't support SATA because SATA was too new. I remember having data destroyed by a shitty Firewire driver because I tried to run RAID1 across Firewire. I remember when I resorted to software RAID across IDE because IDE drivers were actually mature enough to work without causing kernel panics all the time.
Your 18 years of inexperience isn't worth fucking shit, apparently.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday September 23 2016, @04:03AM
Oh I know it happens here in penguin land too. I had a Promise IDE RAID card that was rock solid on RHEL/WHEL 3 and 4. Hell, I -built- WBEL4 on it. But sometime around the Fedora 7 period the kernel would see it and shit all over the filesystem if I was dumb enough to mount it rw when testing. For awhile I could get a source tree from Promise to build with some manual patching, it was a lot slower but didn't corrupt data so the only winning move. Eventually that too wasn't possible any longer and it was time to toss the card, the now obsolete drives and cage and get on with life.
But of course the odds are a lot lower of getting hosed like that on Linux, the tales of woe from Windows land of hardware being thrown into landfills because Windows + 1 didn't support the stuff are legion. You are dependent on either Microsoft caring enough to make the driver or a vendor writing one for an out of production device... which rarely if ever happens.
But the tell on this article that is is pure marketing bullcrap is "our industry-leading 360-hinge design in the best way possible we have used a storage controller mode" which makes me reach for the duct tape to keep my head from 'sploding. WTF?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday September 23 2016, @04:19AM
I remember when Linux didn't support SATA because SATA was too new. I remember having data destroyed by a shitty Firewire driver because I tried to run RAID1 across Firewire. I remember when I resorted to software RAID across IDE because IDE drivers were actually mature enough to work without causing kernel panics all the time.
Your 18 years of inexperience isn't worth fucking shit, apparently.
And I remember a Windows installation within a decade ago completely trashing a drive's contents because the installer didn't understand SATA but also didn't state that it didn't. Instead of complaining about unsupported hardware it tried to install anyway, trashing everything on the disk. Grandparent poster gave in to hyperbole a bit, but the basic point is sound: storage has been pretty well solved and usable in OSes for many years. Even with SSDs the difficulty came with using them efficiently rather than being unable to use them at all. This is a shitty situation created by a bad decision by a company, not a problem with any specific OS.
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If anyone's curious, the rest of the mini-story about Windows and SATA: after the initial data destruction, I got a driver disc and tried to use that during install attempt #2, but of course it wouldn't work because the installer only accepted drivers from floppies. I hadn't had a computer with a floppy drive in years at that point, so it looked like I was going to end up having to get the newly-released shitshow that was Vista, or deal with trying to find a copy of XP that had SATA drivers on-disc.
I decided it wasn't worth the bullshit and my dual-boot system turned into Debian-only. I'd only been using Windows for games anyway, so it wasn't a huge loss. Later on, I stuck Win7 on a small HD I salvaged from another system for occasional gaming, but the damage was done. I went from regular dual booting to going months between boots. :P