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Yep - and for a very long time, too.

Knoppix uses the rewritten NTFS driver which supports loopback read-write mounting a file on NTFS. Nothing new, the now also dead Phat Linux already did the same in 2002 with the same open source kernel driver. Currently the most popular "run Linux from NTFS" distribution is TopologiLinux.

It's very nice to see Knoppix caught up too.

taken from the Configure.help from linux 2.4.23:

CONFIG_UMSDOS_FS
Say Y here if you want to run Linux from within an existing DOS partition of your hard drive. The advantage of this is that you can get away without repartitioning your hard drive (which often implies backing everything up and restoring afterwards) and hence you're able to quickly try out Linux or show it to your friends; the disadvantage is that Linux becomes susceptible to DOS viruses and that UMSDOS is somewhat slower than ext2fs. Another use of UMSDOS is to write files with long unix filenames to MSDOS floppies; it also allows Unix-style soft-links and owner/permissions of files on MSDOS floppies. You will need a program called umssync in order to make use of UMSDOS; read
<file:Documentation/filesystems/umsdos.txt>.


From memory, there's still a distro around called 'PHAT linux' or something like that that will install to a fat32 partition and use loadlin+umsdos to work inside the filesystem.
Don't know if it's still active, could well be, not so useful now that people use ntfs even on 'home' systems.

ashridah

OK, This looks good, I found the ISOs at the Phat Linux Source Forge page and more information at their homepage. I'll make one more post here, to let anyone who's interested know how it works for me, after the download is done.

Microsoft has been doing this ever since they started barring OEM's from providing full versions of the OS on the CD's supplied with a new computer.

To reinstall the OS now, the entire hard drive must be wiped, returning it to the exact state it was when it left the factory. This is a very shrewd anti-Linux move by MS. They have effectively made it impossible for people to repartition and reinstall Windows in a way that coexists with Linux, or any other OS for that matter.

The thing to do is to make Linux install itself using the existing Windows filesystems already on the disk! The distribution Phat Linux is designed for just this, I have heard.

http://www.phatlinux.com/

It installs to an existing FAT32 or NTFS partition, and Linux is represented as a directory on a Windows drive! This is a good way to let people try out Linux without risking their Windows installation.

What would be wonderful is a distribution that is standalone on a CD like Knoppix, and if the user likes what they see on the CD, they can also choose to install it to their hard drive in a Windows-safe way like Phat Linux. It will be great when we see a distribution like this, and it will really reduce people's fear of having Linux run on their computer. When they lose their fear of Linux, and are ready to take full advantage of it, they will then be ready to run it completely from its own partition.

Sounds kind of like Phat Linux to me.

What kind of survey records a score of 1 when it also has a category of "Other" which had 32 respondents. I am sure that the people at http://WWW.PHATLINUX.COM/ are chuffed but I would hardly call it professional reporting. Then again, Phat just got some free promotion as I had never heard of it before.

Here are some other distros using partionless installs: PhatLinux, WinLinux2000, and DOSLinux. Information o nthese, as well as a great number of other Linux distros are available at linux.org. Please remember the loopback distors are slower than normal distros due to the nature of their filesystems. They are great for people wanting to try Linux, however. All you have to do to uninstall the system is delete 1 directory.

However -- what are the advantages to slackware?

Incidentally, something similar is BigSlack (on the same page as ZipSlack). It is a mostly (as opposed to fairly) complete system, including a pre-configured X. It also uses a UMSDOS filesystem (a la Phat Linux), and the above statements about moving it also apply. It weighs in a little heavier, though; around 800 megs. But, obviously, you don't have to repartition or anything if you don't want to.

Let's see -- more stuff. Slackware is often considered to be a hacker's paradise because it imposes few restrictions on you, and I've heard it said that this is a sweet distribution if you like to roll your own binaries. And (like most Linuxes) it's highly customizable. FWIW, it uses BSD-style init scripts, but it also fakes SysV for those programs that insist on it.

Downsides: "Slackware package management" (that's an oxymoron, right?) is a joke. There are utilities like installpkg and pkgtool, but these are just scripts with an (n)curses-based front-end (as are the installation and configuration programs). What else? Installpkg insists on unpacking your tarballs relative to root, unless (I think) you have a certain $ENV_VAR set. I didn't bother to figure it out, so if I decide to remove some of the stuff I put in, I'll have a hell of a time tracking down all the cruft. (Yes, it My Own Damn Fault.) RPM is thrown in there, but I tried it on an .rpm I downloaded (couldn't get a tarball) and it choked and refused to run because it couldn't find some database-type (I assume) file it needed. So I used the rpm2tgz utility. And for some odd reason, the kernel would oops and dump core in ZipSlack 7.0 whenever I hit the /dev directory (while trying to copy it over or even a simple 'ls /dev'). (4.0 didn't do this.) Could be my hardware, but I don't know.

A little disclaimer: Slackware is the only distro I've used so far. I've been thinking of taking Debian (potato, after it's stable) or SuSE for a spin, but I haven't yet. ("Plan to throw one away" applies here, right? {g})

Overall, I'd say it has a very fun feel. And it seems that Pat V.'s taking it a little more seriously (if that's the right word -- professionally, maybe?) now, with a separate directory for updates to slackware-current, security updates and mailing lists for same, etc. And 7.0 was upgraded to one of the latest glibc2's, whereas 4.0 labored along with libc5. Take it for a spin. Put it on a spare or development box and play around with it. I consider this one to be nice to learn on, if you're a computer nerd like me. IMO, this Linux is not going to be the "Linux for the desktop," but as a hacker's distribution, it's pretty cool.

--

Until I get to a point where I can partition my computer I am running a version of Linux that runs on my FAT 32 partition called Phat Linux. You can get it at http://www.phatlinux.com. However, I am running on the SiS530 chipset, and have no problems runing X at 1024x768x32. I also believe that it uses the Red Hat configuration program. I don't know why it looks like crap on your machine.

A distro that installs under windows? Wow. Phat Linux has run off a windows partition for, oh, ages.

If it's like PhatLinux, they may have just one big file in the FAT partition that contains the linux filesytems that are then mounted via a loopback device. Now as far as using Windows Drivers, it during the install process, it may scan the windows registry to figure out how your machine is currently configured and use that information to configure any linux drivers and X so you don't have to.