[ale] OT: How long before a lawsuit now?

[Brian Pitts]

I'm more interested in what the website hosts than the name. It looks to 
be a debian version of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/install.exe , which was 
itself inspired by http://www.topologilinux.com/ . The idea driving all 
these projects is that Linux adoption would increase if users could 
install it from within Windows... no burning cd's, partitoning, etc.

The (unofficial) Ubuntu implementation is currently

"The installer will be based on the [WWW] Nullsoft Scriptable Install 
System, because it is flexible and open-source. It will use the [WWW] 
BattleTorrent plugin to download ubuntu.img and swap.img via BitTorrent, 
in order to conserve bandwidth. As it is downloading, a progress bar 
will indicate how much longer it will take to download.

ubuntu.img will be the Ubuntu hard drive image. It will be used as a 
loopmounted EXT3 filesystem, and will be placed in the C:\ubuntu 
directory. ubuntu.img will be a preconfigured hard drive image, which 
already has all portions of the installation set up, except those 
specific to the hardware, such as the X11 configuration, and the 
user-specific portions, such as the home directory and timezone. 
swap.img will be a hard drive image of the swap partition. It will be 
placed in the C:\ubuntu directory.

The installer will ask the user to specify his desired username and 
password. It will also detect the time zone and locale based on 
information in the Windows registry. The installer will write this data 
into the file config.txt in the C:\ubuntu directory.

[WWW] GRLDR, a modified version of GRUB, allows dual-booting the 
loopmounted hard drive image and Windows, and doesn't require any 
changes to the MBR, as it writes to the Windows boot.ini, so it will be 
used as the bootloader. This bootloader will be installed at the end of 
the installation, and the original boot.ini file will be backed up. Once 
the bootloader is installed, the installer will have a "reboot into 
Ubuntu" button that will restart the system.

On the first bootup, the data from the config.txt file generated by the 
installer will be read, and will be used to set up the system. The 
hardware will be detected, and X11 and other hardware-dependent portions 
of the system will be configured. All of this will be done 
automatically, and will not require user interaction. Once this is done, 
booting will continue, and will boot into Ubuntu."

-Brian