Debian Gets Win32 Installer

An anonymous reader writes "Debian hacker Robert Millan has just announced the availability of a Debian-Installer Loader for win32. The program, inspired by Ubuntu's similar project, features 64-bit CPU auto-detection, download of linux/initrd netboot images, and chainloading into Debian-Installer via grub4dos. The frontend site goodbye-microsoft.com/ has been set up for advocacy purposes. Here are some screenshots."

Almost Too Easy?

[P(0)(!P(k)+P(k+1))]

The ease with which someone could blow away their Windows install (and apposite data) is hilarious, actually; the frontpage is slick, and the Debian logo has a nice, clean svg -> png feel.

The one thing I always felt FOSS had going for it were pious, minimalist interfaces;* goodbye-microsoft.com [goodbye-microsoft.com] is no exception.

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* And dangerous ones, like fdisk.

Re:IE exploit?

[Joebert]

Microsoft would likely be willing to pay said fanboy big bucks.

Well that didn't work

[skiflyer]

I just tried it, it said everything went fine, I chose the Debian Installer at reboot, and I got a grub menu with 3 choices, expert, standard and auto. All three resulted in a "file not found message", so I booted back to XP.

very bad idea,IMO

[CdBee]

I always feel that different operating systems should be on different parttions so as to gve better redundancy and the ability to remove one without wiping the others. It was a bad idea when MS allowed Windows 2000 and 98 to coexist on a single FAT32 partition and this is a bad idea now..

If the Debian people want to make migration easier, they should built a Win32 app that exports outlook express email to mbx and installs it into Thunderbird, copies over address books, favourites and wallpaper. THATs the sort of thing that gets a newbie linux user feeling happy.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Ubuntu+Windows not hard at all.

[bazorg]

The problem is not merely including software extras with windows, it's the way they're made mandatory and favoured over 3rd party alternatives. the EU got a different build of Windows when requested MS to remove Media Player, that shouldn't have to happen. On a Mac, if you drag Safari to the trash bin it will not drag the Help system with it...