14 DAY TRIAL // People started reporting a few days back that trying to boot Ubuntu 12.04 or Ubuntu 12.10 on a few selected Samsung laptops would essentially brick them due to a conflict with UEFI boot.
The laptops affected so far are NP300E5C, NP530U3C, NP700Z3C, NP700Z5C, NP700Z7C and NP900X4C from Samsung. This is just the tip of the iceberg because the Samsung driver is used by other laptops as well.
Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel developer and maintainer, is one of the guys who made that driver, back in 2010, using Samsung's own code.
“Hm, who would have thought that just randomly poking memory of a laptop would brick it. Long ago Samsung told me that it was just fine to be doing this, and that there would not be any problems (I based the samsung-laptop driver on code that Samsung themselves gave me.) Turns out, it wasn't true, which is sad,” stated Greg Kroah-Hartman in a Google Plus post.
The good news is that a patch has been pushed into the kernel tree and it should be available soon, when the new versions is launched, which is to say in a few days.