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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."
>> 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
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.
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
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
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