Install Linux from a running Windows system, without need for a live USB (opens in new tab)

I don't think Windows has "come with" installation CDs for a long time. But can't you still "buy" Windows discs? That's usually a better version of Windows anyway.

i started with dual booting - and later without hesitation i delete all windows-related partitions and stickers in all work and family computers.

every minute spent on windows appears like time lost.

Gave me a chuckle. HN must not be in the mood for frivolity today :)

...and getting the license money back! Or not :(

I would like to do that, but Linux still has not mastered the arcane art of scrolling a webpage without tearing.

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.

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

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

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.

> double click the .deb file and install with no hassle

That sounds like a great way to finally introduce the concept of trojan-horse malware to the consumer Linux ecosystem.

You should almost never be installing a raw .deb, anyway, because packages form networks of requirements/versions/etc. It’s probably outdated, and might even be for the wrong version of the OS—or even for the wrong distro!

The proper GUI workflow, I think, would be for third-parties like Google to offer for download some sort of file representing just an apt PGP-code-signing-identity + source list; and then double-clicking it would open it in Software Center or the like to do the GUI equivalent of apt-add-repository: asking you if you want to trust $ORG and follow the http://org.example.com apt repo. You’d say yes, and then `apt update` would get triggered, and new packages would appear (hopefully highlighted as such) in the Software Center list.

I’m kind of surprised things don’t already work this way. I think it’s because—other than Chrome—there’s pretty much nothing consumers want to install on Linux that isn’t best installed from the distro’s first-party package repo. For Debian/Ubuntu at least, I can’t think of a single PPA or vendor apt host—other than Chrome’s—that solves a consumer (rather than developer/administrator) use-case.

Sorry, it is Windows that is lagging behind. As a Linux user I find myself insecure running applications from the web. Distribution maintained packages is the way to go. And package managers has GUI shells - last time I used it was Ubuntu Software Center [1] on Ubuntu 9.10. Looks like these days it is Ubuntu Snap [2].

Windows finally catching up with winget [3], already GUI shells by 3rd party developers [4], some day may be part of the installation. I do not know why it took so long, there is no Chrome both on Steam Store and Microsoft Store. Looks like Microsoft tried to bend developers [5], but what's with Valve?

Searching and downloading of installers, keeping them is such a crappy experience. On Linux is 1000% better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Software_Center

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(package_manager)

[3] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/tree/master/manifes...

[4] https://www.google.com/search?q=winget+GUI

[5] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16797358/microsoft-googl...

If it means anything, KDE allows you to click on a .deb and install it. I’ve had good luck with Kubuntu and ElementaryOS.

Couldn't you do this with WSL2 and saved yourself 3 hours?

It's the best of both worlds really.

Why not use the Ubuntu store?

> I was hoping that he would be able to just double click the .deb file and install with no hassle, but he couldn't. I don't know if was the package manager fault or google's

And yet people praise Android for "inventing" the app store and preventing people from [inadvertently] installing stuff from random website.

Fun fact: you can do that for Windows too. It also works fine... assuming you can even boot it. :-) You need to make sure Windows is booting from something it sees as disk rather than a partition (i.e. include an MBR or something before it). The main caveat is preventing the host from mounting the volume, otherwise the guest can't write to it. But I've managed to do this (yes it's painful) and it's great.

Pro tip: You can even make an immutable disk representing your entire disk and then boot the very same OS that is running VirtualBox from it. It's an awesome way to test changes you want to make to your system that you're unsure about.

That's a legitimate way to install Linux, and allows you to do your stuff on the machine in the meantime. One caveat is that the proper hardware won't be seen by Linux, however the kernel itself is generic anyway—only the userland setup will need to be adjusted.

What I'm really not sure about is how to install a bootloader in this approach. Dunno if Virtualbox can access the entire drive and specifically the boot sector. (IIRC I'd fire up a USB stick anyway for this finishing touch, though not having to fiddle with the Grub install almost makes it worthwhile to just use the full live installer in the first place.)

I used to dual boot Windows 7 and some Linux disro, and while in Windows 7 I could also run the same Linux distro in VirtualBox using the raw disk VMDK.

I've done the reverse recently - a machine that I had no direct access to hosed itself after a Windows update. A friend got to the machine with a modified Ubuntu image that loaded SSH on boot, I booted the Windows 10 installer through QEMU and reinstalled on to the physical drive.

The really scary version is when you use the entire system disk instead of just a partition.

I remember loopback mounting always gave errors on shutdown when the file system was being unmounted. It seemed to me that it would unmount before caches were flushed, resulting in a need for fsck later (and possibly resulting in corruption or data loss). Do you know if there's been any attempt to address issues like these?

I wrote/donated the code for the original integration with the Windows bootloader for the non-Uefi version. It must have been almost ten years ago, it was even distributed on the official Ubuntu install cd. I didn’t know the project was still around.

+1 for wubi-uefi, really good there is a fork of the original version and it works perfectly. I just wish it was working with non-Ubuntu based distros

It's been around since 13 years at least. I remember a website [1] that offered such installer.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160523181321/http://goodbye-mi...

Nice! Reminds me of when people used to call scraping Windows off a computer "defenestrating" it.