Red Hat has moved to ease fears that the new secure boot mechanism included in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system will make it overly difficult to also install Linux on Windows 8 machines.

In a blog post, Red Hat vice president of engineering Tim Burke sought to reassure Linux lovers that they will be free to install various versions of the open source OS alongside Windows 8 — despite Microsoft’s introduction of a new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) for ensuring the integrity of an operating system when it boots up.

“A major shortcoming of the initial UEFI secure boot implementation was the lack of easy to use accommodations for operating systems other than Microsoft Windows, including the many variants of Linux,” Burke writes. “Red Hat has worked for many months, in conjunction with industry consortium The Linux Foundation, hardware partners, and Microsoft to collaboratively develop a UEFI secure boot mechanism that allows user/customer choice and ease of use.”