8 ms·

Install Linux from a running Windows system, without need for a live USB

195 points by reader_1000 6y ago

8bitsrule 6y ago
This may become legendary.
jedieaston 6y ago
In a similar vein, wubi-uefi[0] is a fork of the original Wubi project, made to be compatible with newer versions of Ubuntu-based distros and newer versions of Windows. Upside is that it uses the built in Windows bootloader, so you don't have to rebuild it if you want to get rid of Linux. It's incompatible with Bitlocker though. [0]: https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi
- bdz 6y ago
  +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
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  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?
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
captn3m0 6y ago
The scariest Linux installation I'd ever done was by creating a Vitual Disk for an existing partition (you can map a disk to a virtual disk) on VirtualBox as a VMDK file, then mounting that as the root partition for a VM that booted from an SamuraiLinux ISO and installed it on the root partition. Very surprisingly, it worked without breaking anything. [0]: https://askubuntu.com/a/47122/11736 https://askubuntu.com/a/47122/11736
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  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.
  - my123 6y ago
    Windows can also boot from a VHDX directly, which is pretty nice. (having a VM both as a VM and a boot option)
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      Yeah, though one issue with that is that expanding or shrinking it is so much more painful.
- aasasd 6y ago
  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.)
miles 6y ago
The project description ("Install Linux over or alongside an existing Windows install, straight from Windows, without requiring to boot from external media like a flash drive or making BIOS configuration changes") reminded me of the old BeOS 5 Personal Edition installer which "installs from within Windows without partitioning" and "kicks Windows out of memory and boots BeOS in its place."[1] In the same review, Scot went on to say: "I tested the Windows installer on several machines, and was amazed. Not only did everything work as advertised -- it worked better than I dreamed possible. BeOS has always been the easiest OS on the planet to install, bar none, but this is ridiculous. BeOS is up and running in five minutes or less, and everything is totally painless. Linux distributors should be taking notes." Sounds like someone did! ;-) [1] https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/13-beos_5/ https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/13-beos_5/
- sildur 6y ago
  Loadlin did something similar, but with msdos and linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin
  - myself248 6y ago
    I did horrible things with a parallel-port ZIP drive. Had to start loadlin with the kernel parameters to load the appropriate module for it to continue booting... Side note, running with your root filesystem on a ZIP disk is not performant.
  - cesarb 6y ago
    And combined with UMSDOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMSDOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMSDOS), which stored the Linux files as if they were normal files in the MS-DOS FAT partition, you could run Linux as if it was a normal MS-DOS program (except that you had to reboot to get back to DOS).
  - locusofself 6y ago
    fuck ya I used to loadlin from win98, first thing I thought when I saw this post. I had some distro that didn't even need a real disk partition too, it just used a directory on the windows partition as it's root fs
raintrees 6y ago
Awesome, thank you. I am always looking for methods with the least friction to win people over to using Linux.
Jonnax 6y ago
Has anyone tried it? I see the repo owner created an issue for success stories from users but it's empty. If it works, it's very awesome!
sandworm101 6y ago
But where is the joy? The best part of installing linux on a windows machine is killing windows. Bypassing the normal boot process. Deleting the partitions. Pealing off those little windows stickers and seeing them on the trash heap is only reason anyone installs linux. I wish windows still came with installation CDs. I need more coasters.
- dTal 6y ago
  Gave me a chuckle. HN must not be in the mood for frivolity today :)
- a3n 6y ago
  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.
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    You don’t really need to anymore. Microsoft provides ISOs for consumer editions, and others editions are available through MSDN and Docker Hub from Microsoft directly.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  ...and getting the license money back! Or not :(
  - deadbunny 6y ago
    When I bought an XPS 15 a few years back I hopped into their webchat and I complained I couldn't get it with Ububtu like the XPS 13 and wasn't happy I had to pay for Windows the support agent just took £120ish off the price.
- diminish 6y ago
  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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zozbot234 6y ago
Win32-loader https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/win32-loader https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/win32-loader can do this from Windows 9x up to Windows 7 and possibly later. The author of this may want to work with that project, which is well maintained as part of Debian. It might be a lifesaver for devices that can't read external USB at boot.
atum47 6y ago
Man, I'm trying real hard to make my dad to use linux, I spent 3 hours last weekend formatting and setting up his computer with ubuntu, but developers are letting new users down. He is familiar with chrome, so after the installation he downloaded chrome. At this point 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... All I now is as long as people have to use the terminal to do basic things, windows users won't be able to make te switch. Nice job though, we need more projects like this.
- derefr 6y ago
  > 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 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.
  - rkangel 6y ago
    What you have described basically is how you install Chrome and a lot of other commercially developed apps (e.g. MS Teams). At least it is in the RPM world and I thought it was for deb too. You download the RPM and click it to 'execute' in your downloads. It opens in software Centre. That package sets up an extra repo and then installs the program you want from that repo.
geofft 6y ago
Debian has supported this for a while using a thing called "win32-loader": https://deb.debian.org/debian/tools/win32-loader/stable/win32-loader.txt https://deb.debian.org/debian/tools/win32-loader/stable/win3... (txt) https://deb.debian.org/debian/tools/win32-loader/stable/win32-loader.exe https://deb.debian.org/debian/tools/win32-loader/stable/win3... (exe)
- debiandev 6y ago
  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-microsoft.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160523181321/http://goodbye-mi...
m4lvin 6y ago
This reminds me of a "Remote Install Party" I did some Debian versions ago. Basically the same, but on a computer in another contry: https://w4eg.de/code/rip/ https://w4eg.de/code/rip/
sadsadsadsad 6y ago
it's called WSL2
moreorless 6y ago
This reminds me of the old depenguinator. http://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/ http://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/
- bitwize 6y ago
  Nice! Reminds me of when people used to call scraping Windows off a computer "defenestrating" it.
rmrfstar 6y ago
A tangentially related, but cool AF project [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_%28software%29
yagodragon 6y ago
Wow, has anyone tried it? I really want it to work as expected. This could really help adoption.
voltagex_ 6y ago
Procedural UI written in PowerShell!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dorgo 6y ago
So, there are no success stories so far? https://github.com/mikeslattery/tunic/issues/12 https://github.com/mikeslattery/tunic/issues/12

195 points by reader_1000 6y ago

This may become legendary.

In a similar vein, wubi-uefi[0] is a fork of the original Wubi project, made to be compatible with newer versions of Ubuntu-based distros and newer versions of Windows. Upside is that it uses the built in Windows bootloader, so you don't have to rebuild it if you want to get rid of Linux. It's incompatible with Bitlocker though. [0]: https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi

bdz 6y ago
+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
mehrdadn 6y ago
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?
ComputerGuru 6y ago
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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

captn3m0 6y ago

The scariest Linux installation I'd ever done was by creating a Vitual Disk for an existing partition (you can map a disk to a virtual disk) on VirtualBox as a VMDK file, then mounting that as the root partition for a VM that booted from an SamuraiLinux ISO and installed it on the root partition. Very surprisingly, it worked without breaking anything. [0]: https://askubuntu.com/a/47122/11736 https://askubuntu.com/a/47122/11736

mehrdadn 6y ago
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.
- my123 6y ago
  Windows can also boot from a VHDX directly, which is pretty nice. (having a VM both as a VM and a boot option)
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    Yeah, though one issue with that is that expanding or shrinking it is so much more painful.
aasasd 6y ago
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.)

miles 6y ago

The project description ("Install Linux over or alongside an existing Windows install, straight from Windows, without requiring to boot from external media like a flash drive or making BIOS configuration changes") reminded me of the old BeOS 5 Personal Edition installer which "installs from within Windows without partitioning" and "kicks Windows out of memory and boots BeOS in its place."[1] In the same review, Scot went on to say: "I tested the Windows installer on several machines, and was amazed. Not only did everything work as advertised -- it worked better than I dreamed possible. BeOS has always been the easiest OS on the planet to install, bar none, but this is ridiculous. BeOS is up and running in five minutes or less, and everything is totally painless. Linux distributors should be taking notes." Sounds like someone did! ;-) [1] https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/13-beos_5/ https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/13-beos_5/

sildur 6y ago
Loadlin did something similar, but with msdos and linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin
- myself248 6y ago
  I did horrible things with a parallel-port ZIP drive. Had to start loadlin with the kernel parameters to load the appropriate module for it to continue booting... Side note, running with your root filesystem on a ZIP disk is not performant.
- cesarb 6y ago
  And combined with UMSDOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMSDOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMSDOS), which stored the Linux files as if they were normal files in the MS-DOS FAT partition, you could run Linux as if it was a normal MS-DOS program (except that you had to reboot to get back to DOS).
- locusofself 6y ago
  fuck ya I used to loadlin from win98, first thing I thought when I saw this post. I had some distro that didn't even need a real disk partition too, it just used a directory on the windows partition as it's root fs

raintrees 6y ago

Awesome, thank you. I am always looking for methods with the least friction to win people over to using Linux.

Jonnax 6y ago

Has anyone tried it? I see the repo owner created an issue for success stories from users but it's empty. If it works, it's very awesome!

sandworm101 6y ago

But where is the joy? The best part of installing linux on a windows machine is killing windows. Bypassing the normal boot process. Deleting the partitions. Pealing off those little windows stickers and seeing them on the trash heap is only reason anyone installs linux. I wish windows still came with installation CDs. I need more coasters.

dTal 6y ago
Gave me a chuckle. HN must not be in the mood for frivolity today :)
a3n 6y ago
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.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  You don’t really need to anymore. Microsoft provides ISOs for consumer editions, and others editions are available through MSDN and Docker Hub from Microsoft directly.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
...and getting the license money back! Or not :(
- deadbunny 6y ago
  When I bought an XPS 15 a few years back I hopped into their webchat and I complained I couldn't get it with Ububtu like the XPS 13 and wasn't happy I had to pay for Windows the support agent just took £120ish off the price.
diminish 6y ago
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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zozbot234 6y ago

Win32-loader https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/win32-loader https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/win32-loader can do this from Windows 9x up to Windows 7 and possibly later. The author of this may want to work with that project, which is well maintained as part of Debian. It might be a lifesaver for devices that can't read external USB at boot.

atum47 6y ago

Man, I'm trying real hard to make my dad to use linux, I spent 3 hours last weekend formatting and setting up his computer with ubuntu, but developers are letting new users down. He is familiar with chrome, so after the installation he downloaded chrome. At this point 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... All I now is as long as people have to use the terminal to do basic things, windows users won't be able to make te switch. Nice job though, we need more projects like this.

derefr 6y ago
> 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 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.
- rkangel 6y ago
  What you have described basically is how you install Chrome and a lot of other commercially developed apps (e.g. MS Teams). At least it is in the RPM world and I thought it was for deb too. You download the RPM and click it to 'execute' in your downloads. It opens in software Centre. That package sets up an extra repo and then installs the program you want from that repo.

geofft 6y ago

Debian has supported this for a while using a thing called "win32-loader": https://deb.debian.org/debian/tools/win32-loader/stable/win32-loader.txt https://deb.debian.org/debian/tools/win32-loader/stable/win3... (txt) https://deb.debian.org/debian/tools/win32-loader/stable/win32-loader.exe https://deb.debian.org/debian/tools/win32-loader/stable/win3... (exe)

debiandev 6y ago
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-microsoft.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160523181321/http://goodbye-mi...

m4lvin 6y ago

This reminds me of a "Remote Install Party" I did some Debian versions ago. Basically the same, but on a computer in another contry: https://w4eg.de/code/rip/ https://w4eg.de/code/rip/

sadsadsadsad 6y ago

it's called WSL2

moreorless 6y ago

This reminds me of the old depenguinator. http://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/ http://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/

bitwize 6y ago
Nice! Reminds me of when people used to call scraping Windows off a computer "defenestrating" it.

rmrfstar 6y ago

A tangentially related, but cool AF project [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_%28software%29

yagodragon 6y ago

Wow, has anyone tried it? I really want it to work as expected. This could really help adoption.

voltagex_ 6y ago

Procedural UI written in PowerShell!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dorgo 6y ago

So, there are no success stories so far? https://github.com/mikeslattery/tunic/issues/12 https://github.com/mikeslattery/tunic/issues/12