I am happy to say that as of at least the FOG release on 7/24/2015, FOG installs and runs fine on Debian 8 (Jessie). Even the issue of the TFTP service not starting right after rebooting the server is resolved (by whom, I can’t say, but I know it is gone).

I have tested FOG and Debian 8 installations on existing FOG installations running on Debian 7, and on a fresh Debian 8 installation. If you are upgrading a Debian 7 installation, you will need to rerun your FOG installer (from a current GIT pull) after the Debian 7-8 upgrade is complete AND you have rebooted your server. If you have ANY software that is showing as “not upgraded” in apt-get, then your upgrade is not complete.

SVN will look a bit odd at first glance since its revision number no longer matches the current software revision that you will receive.

For example (numbers are made up for my time’s sake):
SVN shows rev 3899, installed FOG shows 4591. This is okay and normal now.

Given some unforeseen circumstance, I really doubt Secure Boot will ever be supported. UEFI support technically exists, it just requires customization for each network.

I was working on UEFI boot for a while before other projects came up. The result I came up against was that you either need to have a Linux DHCP or a Windows Server 2012R2 with DHCP present on the network. You could then configure the DHCP to serve different boot file names depending on detected architecture.

If nobody else does the documentation for the Windows Server configuration before I complete my current projects, I will put it into the Wiki.

And if you want to use the Debian family (Debian, Ubuntu, anything ending in “buntu”), then just get plain, vanilla, not messed with and works just fine Debian.

The best version of Ubuntu that I can recommend for any server installation is called Debian.

Windows 7 still thought SATA was a little hard. Before you upload the image, you should generalize the way Windows handles its storage drivers. HowTo:

How to change sata modes after windows installation
What that will do is force Windows to try multiple different types of storage driver on boot, instead of just the last one it used. The reason you are having this is that the VM likely used a form of IDE driver, and your Dell Optiplex 3020 defaults to AHCI mode on its SATA port.

If you really didn’t want to upload the image again, you could go to the BIOS and change the SATA mode to IDE or Compatibility. This should allow you to boot at least, but you will be running the drive controller much slower than it is capable of.

If you can reupload the image, then yes, I would do a fresh install on the 3020 and overwrite the VM image.

The mode you would want to switch to to make the current image boot is ATA by the way.

My two cents, I would suggest Debian or Fedora, and using Hyper-V instead of VirtualBox. Also ensure your drives on the server are fast, and/or your RAID array is properly set up for fast sequential reads. And if you have an AV on the host, make sure it is told to leave your VHD files alone.

Make sure you have your Surface on the latest firmware, or if not the August firmware, at least the July firmware. They’ve done some serious cleanup on the Surface EFI firmware that has made it a bit more network boot friendly.

Which type of imaging options did you select?

Saw that. Good work. The only reason I wanted WDS and FOG to work together was to leverage WDS’s handling of UEFI/BIOS identification. But the DHCP method is much more elegant and less resource intensive.

I am glad that you got that working though. Options are valuable when doing IT work.

Also please remember that UEFI is not necessarily Secure Boot. Secure Boot is an optional feature of UEFI, which you you will need to disable if you want to boot ANYTHING other than Windows. Yes, technically Secure Boot signing is available to the Linux community, but very few Linux kernels will ever work with Secure Boot.

UEFI support handles the new method of using the hardware initialization and interaction which is much more efficient than BIOS, which is one of the reasons that an OS that supports UEFI can boot so much faster on a UEFI board. So yes, you can make FOG work with a UEFI ecosystem, but you will either need to disable Secure Boot on each workstation every time you want to boot it with FOG, or you will need to disable Secure Boot completely. Honestly Secure Boot is more of a benefit to consumers, and only helps prevent them from getting their bootloader hijacked. A company or enterprise network should have other security measures in place that help prevent and/or mitigate this risk.

Curiosity is killing me… what where you wanting to do with this kind of setup?

What is your virtualization environment?

@Tom-Elliott True, if you are imaging odd systems, you absolutely want to specify LAN drivers. However the Windows Driver Framework supports so many classes of LAN adapters, chances are yours are already supported by built in Windows drivers. You should of course test a few systems before rolling out a new image.

You may need to check that the UEFI Windows Boot Manager option in the BIOS is pointed at the right location.

Via Google:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3407823/mysqlnd-driver-in-php-5-3-2-on-ubuntu-10-04

@Wayne-Workman In relation to your manual installation of drivers… Windows 10 is able to automatically identify and install drivers for so many devices anymore, its hard to want to bother even adding drivers manually for most workstations.

@Wayne-Workman We’re in the process of replacing an XP desktop that was running the controller for our HVAC with a Windows 10 system. I guess we can let this new one sit for another 10 years.

The release will be soon.