@SkOrPn

Nice ;D

--
Shouldn't be necessary to load the USB driver, or type any additional command if the USB is present. This version of DUET has already it's own XhciDxe.
Also, you could, I suppose use the REFIND boot manager now to boot the USB from the graphical menu. In theory the bootable element should appear by refreshing the application with either the "Esc" or "Backspace" key.
If it does not perhaps the partition driver is missing. If that the case, you must find the right driver and add them to the "drivers" directory in /EFI/Boot/drivers and REFIND will auto load them for you.

@Fernando

I need to put together few sentence first. Anyway welcome and thanks to you for the place!

@noInk

Ah, OK I never thought to test the USB on this version as it was my bed time the last time I posted, haha. Thanks for the info and this version of DUET. I have spent several years now looking for exactly this tool. I guess all the pieces were available and just needed someone to assemble them in the correct order. It made perfect sense for the MAC guys to do it because there are a lot of old legacy BIOS only Macs out there that can perfectly run the UEFI aware OSX, and on newer NVMe devices no less.

But for people like myself with powerful overclocked Intel 6-core Xeons (on legacy bios hardware) I just have not had a good enough reason to upgrade hardware yet. I felt my system was only missing USB 3.1 and NVMe, and now here in 2017 both seem to work just fine thanks to DUET.

Now I am going to do research this weekend to see if I can theme it myself, haha. Thanks again @Fernando and @noInk

FYI: There is a mistake in the refind.conf file for the background scaling. It should read like so:

Zitat

---

banner themes/Min/background.png

# Specify how to handle banners that aren't exactly the same as the screen
# size:
# noscale - Crop if too big, show with border if too small
# fillscreen - Fill the screen
# Default is noscale

banner_scale fillscreen

# Icon sizes. All icons are square, so just one value is

---

But instead it reads like so:

Zitat

---

banner themes/Min/background.png

# Specify how to handle banners that aren't exactly the same as the screen
# size:
# noscale - Crop if too big, show with border if too small
# fillscreen - Fill the screen
# Default is noscale
#
#banner_scale fillscreen (These two lines should have their pound signs removed in order for the "fillscreen" command to work ;)

# Icon sizes. All icons are square, so just one value is

---

@SkOrPn

I do own other platform, but the X58 along the XEON is still more than capable of dealing with anything!
Clover I suppose is good at running an hackintosh or anyway it is far too much ( in a good way ) tailored for the OSX in general and it doesn't really meet mine requirement for a normal daily usage on that platform, since I running different stuff.
About the refind config: on mine the default > noscale look better. Anything else look choppy because the monitor use some non-standard shitty resolution ( thanks to samsung ) while booting and I also made the "mistake" to update it's firmware.. not that I care, but locking setting on firmware upgrade is a bad thing! -- on higher resolution monitor, like your and if you do repaired it, you'll might need to search for an higher resolution background image.
The one I included is 1920x1080 or something, you can also scale it on some editing software btw.. Clover theme should somehow compatible.
I'm glad if you do like it! I think it's pretty much done and if does bug you later on, lemme know, for I will try and fix it!

@noInk

On the default conf file settings it was cutting off most of your image, maybe 75%. I would say the upper left 25% of the image was shown ONLY (center of your 1920x1080 image was very clearly at the bottom right corner of my native 1080p display). I used my own png 8 bit image of 1920x1080 with a dead center logo to discover that the default setting was NOT working with noscale. In order for me to get it working with both "noscale" and "fillscreen" I had to un-comment the line (remove the # signs). That was the only way it was working for me for some reason. Once I removed the # signs it then centered both your 1080 image, and my 1080 image. Thankfully your minimal grey image is not a big deal since it is hard to notice the off-centering that was occurring.

I am currently making a bunch of Asus ROG backgrounds and banners to see what I like and don't like, and in various sizes. This is fun, thank you very very much for this. I already forgot that Clover exists, um what is Clover?

Now to re-learn Paint.NET all over again. lol

Hmm, I also found something else weird. Both the Shut Down and Reboot buttons do the exact same thing, they both reboot the PC. I will try and figure out why. Or I can simply remove the "Shut Down" button altogether.

Yea, ACPI reset ( "reset -s" ) seems not supported by booting from legacy BIOS. EfiResetShutdown goes straight to EfiResetCold.
If you need to shutdown the PC while in the bootloader, go to the OS login and do it from there :p
I added some other icon for the primary function, and removed the shutdown..
-- Can you make a photo? perhaps I understand the issue, cause it seems the internal resolution is fixed @ 1024x768 if the EDID is not found.
I could add additional mode to the GOP but I need to work around the DUET recovery screen, cause it will be also affected.

-- I added these possible combination in case the EDID fail ( it fail cause the VGA come up from the legacy bios or something with the int10 ).
# 3840 2160 || 2560 1440 || 1920 1080 || 1768 992 || 1600 1050 || 1600 1024 || 1600 900 || 1440 900 || 1366 768 || 1360 768 || 1280 1024 || 1280 960 ||
# 1280 800 || 1280 768 || 1280 720 || 1176 664 || 1152 864 || 1024 768 || 800 600 || 720 576 || 720 420 || 640 480 ||

In refind config, you should locate the line setting the screen resolution, something like;
#

resolution 0

#
If you replace the DUET on the USB with this version, you can manually set any of the above resolution, also, notice: the clear screen of refind would even more noticeable, and, (fixed on 8/12 build) the setting would be global for EFI, so if you exit refind or open the shell it will be affected by the resolution changes, cause refind will not set it back, Actually not worth in mine view, duo the things going on the screen and into the refind primitive call to draw the image/generic vga driver -- will see if something is doable later on!

Oh, I fixed the "off-center" issue myself by simply uncommenting the #banner_scale fillscreen to banner_scale fillscreen. I also resized the images to 1024 x 768 just because I don't want refind using up resources to do extra work.

Yeah the shut down thing is no big deal, I wouldn't even bother with it. I can hold my PC button for 4 seconds and bam its off, lol. How often would we need to shut down from the bootloader anyway, like once a year maybe if that. haha

Did you see my first background? I think I will reduce the icon sizes further though.

@SkOrPn

nice screen!
Hope it work for you, for the unknown icon you could try to make one with the distro name or add it somehow dunno!
anyway here we are, happy Christmas! LOL

--
Hey SkOrPn can you provide some feedback on the latest version (11-12-2017) on the fist page?
it should now be pretty much instant at entering windows after refind is done with is things right? do you notice any improvement?
also, I fixed the screenshot so you could make one low res with it :P

Zitat von noInk im Beitrag #160

---

@SkOrPn

nice screen!
Hope it work for you, for the unknown icon you could try to make one with the distro name or add it somehow dunno!
anyway here we are, happy Christmas! LOL

--
Hey SkOrPn can you provide some feedback on the latest version (11-12-2017) on the fist page?
it should now be pretty much instant at entering windows after refind is done with is things right? do you notice any improvement?
also, I fixed the screenshot so you could make one low res with it :P

---

@SkOrPn

Yea, date is kinda inverted LOL
About the screenshot I mean that now you can hit F10 to grab the screen in refind, wasn't working before, the file will be saved within the usb screenshot directory.
For the background I suppose you should keep your configuration along with the theme you created.
If you are sure about the MBR content, it is not necessary to recreate the USB, you could indeed copy over the files.
Hope these 16 seconds are with the old version? :D
I m using a different type of card and it exhibit the opposite issue, it does the aspect ratio by not sending the expansion bit.
It's an MSI 670 PE OC with the """"updated"""" UEFI GOP bios, does your AMD card is compatible with UEFI?
Cause that's a lot! in case you should seek if there are any official update with the UEFI extension for it.
Also, on mine drive the older version are available but not public, so, once you delete it, there no going back unless you keep the local copy.

@noInk

Yeah the 16 seconds was with the old version. Testing the new version now. I just reformatted everything then.

EDIT: OK, its now booting in 10 seconds!!!
Not sure how the heck you can reduce boot time, but you sure did with the new DUET version. You should give these builds your personal version love, such as "DUET_UDK2017_REFIND_v1.0.... or "DUET_UDK2017_REFIND_v11122017" or something along those lines. Haha, I prefer the first method myself.

Thanks for the awesome updates.

Or "DUET_w/REFIND_noInk-v1.0"

Yeah that would be much nicer than the stock naming scheme. I mean you are responsible for these newer builds.

@SkOrPn

Well, that's good to hear and thanks for the feedback and testing.
On mine it does a seamless transaction or 6 seconds it depend by windows status ( should be seamless from power off and 6 sec with reboot ).

Power OFF -- Warning 2MB GIF inside