Hacker News Reader

Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

The project description ("Install Linux over or alongside an existing Windows install, straight from Windows, without requiring to boot from external media like a flash drive or making BIOS configuration changes") reminded me of the old BeOS 5 Personal Edition installer which "installs from within Windows without partitioning" and "kicks Windows out of memory and boots BeOS in its place."[1]

In the same review, Scot went on to say: "I tested the Windows installer on several machines, and was amazed. Not only did everything work as advertised -- it worked better than I dreamed possible. BeOS has always been the easiest OS on the planet to install, bar none, but this is ridiculous. BeOS is up and running in five minutes or less, and everything is totally painless. Linux distributors should be taking notes." Sounds like someone did! ;-)

[1] https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/13-beos_5/

View on HN

Linux boots and installs over itself all the time.

It's interesting how linux kernel dumps work.

You actually have a linux in your linux, and when linux fails, linux takes over and can dump the linux address space so when linux gives up and boots linux, you can use linux to do an autopsy on itself. :)

Or, in other words, you allocate a reserved address space and load a linux#2 kernel in it. When you encounter a panic condition, the system can jump to linux#2 in the reserved address space. It will be non-corrupted and can dump the address space of linux#1 to disk (or a remote system) and reboot.

kexec is the basis for all this, and it can do a lot of other interesting stuff like upgrade in place.

> You actually have a linux in your linux

Yo dawg, I heard you like Linux...

I mean, that's pretty much exactly the joke that was made. Isn't it?

Ubuntu did this with Wubi: https://www.techsupportalert.com/content/easy-way-install-ub... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software)

I miss Wubi! I played with it a lot when I was (much) younger.

Loadlin did something similar, but with msdos and linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin

I did horrible things with a parallel-port ZIP drive. Had to start loadlin with the kernel parameters to load the appropriate module for it to continue booting...

Side note, running with your root filesystem on a ZIP disk is not performant.

And combined with UMSDOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMSDOS), which stored the Linux files as if they were normal files in the MS-DOS FAT partition, you could run Linux as if it was a normal MS-DOS program (except that you had to reboot to get back to DOS).

fuck ya I used to loadlin from win98, first thing I thought when I saw this post. I had some distro that didn't even need a real disk partition too, it just used a directory on the windows partition as it's root fs

I remember installing BeOS 5 PE this way. I think it installed using a loopback configuration. It really was the easiest OS install I have ever done. Even compared to the tools available today, BeOS 5 was like magic. 5 second boot times on a 200 MHz Pentium Laptop. Journalling filesystem. Fast and low-latency.

It's great to see Linux installs going this direction. The ease of install definitely made switching to BeOS simple back in the day.

I did it on a P2 233 from Windows 98. The ease of trying BeOS 5 got me thinking about going beyond the DOS/Windows ecosystem at home and eventually led to linux.

Plus BeOS 5 had both Hotline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications) and IRC clients.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com