installing system on nonlibreboot computer such that it works on libreboot computer

It can work, in my experience, but you need to be farily good at disk cloning, which btw, you may want to test on a computer you don't use very often, before you do it for real, otherwise you probably will have headaches.

Also, you cannot FDE with /boot, encrypting boot will make it nearly impossible if you trying to disk clone from libreboot to stock bios or even coreboot probably.

I am not brave enough to try this at this time, you are free to try, but please don't try on your main computer, accidents will happen.

Also, if you ignore these warnings, at least backup anything important before you attempt this.

Supposedly, qemu has some wiki on how to do it from .img or raw to hdd or ssd.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Images

Scroll down to copying an image to a physical disk.

This might be your best option, but try with a decent usb drive first, preferably, a solid state flash drive capable of at least 300mb per second and only if your comp has usb 3.0 support. ;)

Best wishes on your successful attempt, but keep all I said in mind if you do any of this.

Hi

Libreboot (and osboot) currently offer the choice of GRUB or SeaBIOS, on x86 hardware; they are inserted into the boot flash. This version of GRUB is built using --with-platform=coreboot, so it's bare metal and does not rely on BIOS/UEFI services. Whatever your distro is doing will also not affect the version of GRUB in boot flash, which means you can freely reinstall distros if you'd like.

The automation in Libreboot/osboot's GRUB is fairly sophisticated, and I've been making improvements for the next releases aswell.

The Linux kernel runs on bare metal too, even in BIOS/UEFI setups, on x86, or at least it can.

Any existing distribution that you've installed should boot just fine in Libreboot, with a properly configured GRUB configuration which Libreboot/osboot's version of GRUB will try to detect.

See:

https://libreboot.org/docs/gnulinux/grub_boot_installer.html

https://libreboot.org/docs/gnulinux/grub_cbfs.html

Those links apply to GRUB, but a SeaBIOS payload will work similarly to a typical BIOS system, since SeaBIOS is implement an x86 PC BIOS.

If you're using Libreboot/osboot's version of GRUB, it will ignore any bootloader you've installed on your HDD and simply boot your kernel directly. Video works because coreboot implements either its own framebuffer (which linux has a driver for), text mode (ditto), and when your actual video chipset driver loads up, it will typically take over from coreboot and set up its own framebuffer (if you have Kernel Mode Setting enabled and supported in your distro, which most people do); it's also possible to boot your linux kernel in text mode, if you wish.

Hope this helps!

The same guides also exist on osboot, and they are largely identical.

VESA framebuffers will not work, but those aren't required. For example, on an X200 you'd using corebootfb/textmode and later the i915 video driver (for the Intel graphics chipset) sets up its own framebuffer to replace whatever coreboot did.

However, one consequence is that you should not attempt to use legacy VGA modes when running Libreboot or coreboot, on hardware that Libreboot supports (I assume you'll probably use a thinkpad x200/t400)

if it has libreboot on it, then uefi is not even on the system, Leah can clarify, but I think that part is true, if nothing else...

I was going to write a more thorough guide on disk cloning, but I think I know what you mean now,

you want to take a hard drive out of a non-libreboot computer, one that possibly uses uefi and put it in libreboot and have it run.

I somehow doubt that will work, especially with libreboot. osboot, might... but I have no idea at this time, even if you had the beta version Leah deleted.

Also, I don't know if your hard drive is ssd, or hdd, I assume hdd?

Either way, I think that would be a flat no...

But yeah...

also, Leah, feel free to jump in at any time.

That could be tricky.

I have a laptop that with a broken screen, that had a broken Fedora installation, as well as a Windows installation that may or may not have been broken. I wanted to wipe the disk and install GNU/Linux so I could at least use it with an external monitor, but I couldn't change the UEFI settings to boot from USB, since it doesn't output to an external monitor. I tried installing Debian on the hard disk after putting it in a functioning laptop, but I couldn't get the resulting installation to boot on the original laptop. Eventually I gave up.

I might try again, but perhaps just by figuring out how to boot from USB. I recall that I could see some faint images on the laptop screen, although the backlight didn't turn on, so maybe I could read the UEFI settings.