My stubbornness is the stuff of legend and much maligned by some people that know me. I very, very rarely quit or give up on something. Even more so when it is something that is simple that just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.
Enter this little shitbag, the HP ProBook 4340s.
Rather a nice little 13″ laptop. Aluminum construction, decent i5 with 4gb of RAM and a 120gb SSD. Sounds like a great little Gentoo machine, right?
Well, despite my best efforts, I cannot get this little bastard to boot into legacy mode. Before you ask, I’ve been a sysadmin for 10+ years, and know how to set all the BIOS options. I managed to track down some BIOS updates even though HPs website lists none for the serial number based search I did for my particular machine.
Some of you may say, “Just use UEFI?”
No, I will not, and do not want to use UEFI. Same with my aversion to Pulseaudio and systemd. I don’t like them, and will avoid using them when I can. The laptop running Gentoo isn’t a necessity, I have a Macbook Pro already. It was more to play with, do a little more learning about Gentoo and possibly as a package testing machine. I still plan to move my desktop rig to Gentoo when time allows. It’s the household Plex server currently so I basically need to plan outages.
I think I will sell the Probook, and maybe pick up a favourite of mine, the Thinkpad X220. We will see.