Re: bill gates Linux
On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 03:07:17AM -0800, spiratec@telus.net wrote:
> The response I got to a simple request for an DOS or Windows based
> "SETUP.EXE" program which loads Linux onto my hard drive, would lead
> me to thick I was asking for the combination to Fort Knox.
No, it's because you've misunderstood the nature of the problem. You
have to reboot anyway to switch operating systems; there's vanishingly
little point in us making the installation system run in Windows, where
we can't easily reuse all the work we've done on producing a free
operating system. We have enough to do building a standalone installer
without trying to write code for a non-free operating system, one with
whose innards the majority of our developers aren't familiar - and
installation systems involve some fairly tricky code.
It's simply not a useful thing to do. Just boot into the normal
installer (or, if you find it too painful, use something like the
Progeny installer where more work has been done on making it
newbie-friendly).
> The Linux "kernal" can't be so foreign a language that it can be
> copied ??? All code that the computer uses must come from a bios chip
> or the hard drive not from outer space. I am trying to avoid the
> problem which I have of needing a degree in Rocket Science to even
> see anything on my computer which originates from the blessed Linus
> "kernal". Who in this world can actually read hexadecimal code
> anyway.
Who tries? The Linux kernel isn't directly written in hexadecimal, you
know; people have better things to do than write machine code directly.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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