Windows based installation of Fedora Linux?

Ago agostino.russo at gmail.com
Wed Sep 12 10:43:45 UTC 2007


Hi all,

I am Wubi's author. I'd be happy to help you out if you wish to implement 
something like Wubi for Fedora. I will not have much time to do actual coding 
but at least I can point you out to the relevant code snippets (which is spread 
over different projects and files).

As you are probably aware Wubi is now included within Ubuntu 7.10. The 
interface will change slightly to reflect that. Notably it is now also possible 
to boot a LiveCD/ISO from HD (handy to go around bios issues and helping out 
people with no CD). The frontend can be used almost as is, you need to change 
the branding, version.nsh, IsoList.ini, and preseed.nsh (to generate 
appropriate preseeding information for an automatic installation). There should 
be little Ubuntu/Debian specific code in there. The relevant code is in: 
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-installer/wubi/gutsy. If you want to submit 
patches to "isolate" even more the frontend from Ubuntu specific code, you are 
most welcome.

On the backend side, you need to have ntfs-3g pre-installed by default 
(https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/write-support-for-ntfs), have an 
installer that can work in non-interactive mode 
(https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubiquity-automation), modify the 
standard initrd (grep loop in https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/initramfs-
tools) and the liveCD initrd (https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-
installer/lupin/gutsy). And of course have the installer be aware of loopfile 
targets (https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/partman-auto-loop/ubuntu). 
If you kill all userspace processes at shutdown you have to skip fuse/ntfs-g 
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sysvinit/+bug/87763).

Note: if you poked with the old installer, things have changed quite a bit. We 
used to embed the initrd within the frontend, and that initrd used to override 
the ISO initrd/standard installer which in turns used to override the installed 
(normal boot) initrd. It does not work like that anymore, all initrd changes 
(liveCD initrd and normal-boot initrd) have been moved upstream and the 
frontend extracts the initrd directly from the CD/ISO.

Hope it helps.

Regards,

Ago




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