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Debian win32-loader Goes Official
An anonymous reader writes "After a long process of review and polishing, the win32 loader from goodbye-microsoft.com has finally made its way to official Debian CDs. Latest daily builds of lenny (the development version) are including it, making starting Debian Installer as simple as just a few clicks (OGG). The win32-loader version, now based on GRUB 2, includes new features such as detection and pre-seeding of Windows settings, and is translated to 20 languages."
I'm sure this will be modded as a flame or a troll, but how many people who are willing to install a new (or at least new-to-them, i.e. non-Windows) operating system are afraid of changing the boot order in bios? I guess I'm just having a hard time imagining that those sets have a very large union.
Personally I'm a big fan of the Debian net installer, by far the best Linux installer I've ever used.
New punctuation update "~" (no quotes) at the end of a line to indicate sarcasm. ~
>> by aswalkeraus (563276) Alter Relationship on Thursday September 13, @11:07AM (#20588309)
>>Seriously.... apt-get hell awaits,
Thats the first time I heard that expression, not a total surprise I guess; google says:
Results 1 - 10 of about 558 for "apt-get hell". (0.30 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 16,000 for "rpm hell". (0.12 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 208,000 for "dll hell". (0.07 seconds)
btw. see how much longer it takes google to even come up with the list for apt-get,
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
Well, thanks, for the info....
But what does it say about the Geeks of "Goodbye-Microsoft.com" that no one bothers to explain something as basic as this? "Use of Debian logo does not imply endorsement by the Debian project."
Well, that is reassuring.
Who are these guys and why should I trust them?
In launching the installer are you committing yourself to a total erasure of your Windows OS, partitions, etc?
And the newbie would be right.
Installing debian on a windows system should also scare the crap out of a newbie. He will loose all his old files (including family photos), even if this "win32-loader" allows him to keep his worthless bookmarks.
While I have nothing against trying to convince people to try linux, I have something against the people who will try just about anything, including outright lying, in order to make people switch.
I've had a Portege for ages that I haven't been able to install anything on (apart from the existing W2K) because it has no CD, no floppy and no way to boot off USB devices. I'm guessing this will let me copy get Debian on there with a minimum amount of dicking about. Great!
What I find interesting is the potential for "Linux Phishing" or "Linux Greifing" that this creates. There are already plenty of problems with various viruses loading directly through the browser in Windows, can you imagine what would happen if a "religious Linux fanatic" were to take this, alter it to use a known but unpatched IE vulnerability to auto-install and reboot people's machines into Linux? What would happen if a "religious Microsoft fanatic" did the same thing to try and make Linux look bad?
I've got a baaaad feeling about this...
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
1) sid is a horrible monster that breaks all the time -- this is just not true. Sure, parts of it break from time to time, but for a cutting edge desktop, its great -- lots of current packages that mostly work all the time. You do have to be a little cautious with the upgrades, but it doesn't take much work; a little judicious reading of relevant bug reports is all it really takes to stay fully operational for long periods of time. THe last major sid breakage I remember was about 2 years ago when there was some fubar in the initrd's causing root pivot to fail. But it was fixed in a day and the work-around was posted to d-u within hours, IIRC.
2) testing is a better desktop than sid because its more stable -- this is outright false. Testing is a worse desktop than sid *BECAUSE* its more stable. That means if something breaks, it stays broken for a while. I think the policy is that a package has to sit in sid for 10 days without a change before it can move into testing. That means if a packages slips through sid without a particular problem being noticed (it happens) then it sits in testing until someone files the bug report. Then the fix has to sit in sid for at least 10 days from the time it is uploaded. You can see its very easy to be in a broken situation in testing for quite a while.
The fact is that though sid is subject to breakage, and there is a lot of package churn sometimes, if it does break, it gets fixed pretty quickly. Devs seem to respond pretty quickly to bugs in sid as it stuff they're currently working on. I love running sid and wouldn't do otherwise.
man, I feel like mold.
It should be included. See if /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/ exists. If it doesn't, ask in your distro's forums. If it does, maybe just ask in your distro's forums if there's a gui for setting it up! :) But, if you really want to command-line it, next step is check if /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register exists. If not try:
/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc" and then add a line to "register" of the form :name:type:offset:magic:mask:interpreter:
/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
/usr/bin/wine (full path to wherever the "wine" program is)
.exe extension and it would still run fine.
:)
mount -t binfmt_misc none
and then check again if the "register" file exists. If it doesn't...something's wrong. If it does, then you can add entries like the wikipedia article says. So, you can "cd
Here's an example for Windows applications, using Wine.
cd
echo ':Windows:M::MZ::/usr/bin/wine:' > register
Which has:
name = Windows
type = M (use the magic number, rather than "E" which means use the extension)
offset = just left blank
magic = MZ (magic number for Windows executables, if you'd used "E" previous, you'd put "exe" here)
mask = left blank
interpreter =
Now you can run Windows apps just by typing their name, like any Linux program. In fact, since we used the magic number rather than the extension, you could remove the
You'd probably want to put this in a startup script, or something
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
My first linux experience was booting to it from windows, using slackware, to install into a directory on my drive. Didn't require any partitioning as it used fat and ran on top of that with various hacks to make everything work in a linux friendly fasion. You could start windows, then just run an exe to switch to linux. Of course switching back required a normal reboot, but it certainly made 'trying' linux a easy thing to do. If you didn't like it you just deleted the directory you installed linux into. This was in 1995, give or take a year or so.
Why is this suddenly supposed to be impressive or new? Surely there was a reason that this sort of thing went away, why is it coming back now if it didn't work then?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
This scenario was labeled the "Tux Virus" many years ago.
Typically, the scenario involved a win95 themed wm and a far-fetched belief that wine or openoffice could allow the user to be fooled at least briefly.
hawk
1) Debian's net install download is under 200mb. I don't have to download, install, and un-install a lot of cruft that I don't want.
2) With debian, I upgrade as I go. I don't worry about the six-month goofy name release. I install debian once.
3) Debian is indifferent to which WM/DE you use. For all debian cares, you don't have to run any GUI. Don't even install X11, it's all the same to debian. And you don't need a different *untu, or whatever, to use a differnt GUI. I happen to use IceWM.
4) IMO, Debian has the best package management in the business.
5) With debian I can run a super-stable server, or a bleeding-edge desk, or whatever else. Debian is not a one trick pony. Debian is more like a blank canvas, I can make into whatever I want.
I am glad to see Ubuntu, or any version of Linux, catching on. But I happen to be happy enough with debian.