Oh wow - I built something very like this at university so people could run Linux on their Windows systems (this was way before hardware virtualisation support

Oh wow - I built something very like this at university so people could run Linux on their Windows systems (this was way before hardware virtualisation support was a thing). It created a file on the Windows filesystem that would be used as local storage, dropped a kernel and initrd on there, and left a shortcut on the desktop that if run would trigger a reboot that would then run loadlin. The actual root filesystem got mounted off NFS, but X11 config got written out automatically with some amazingly hackish shell scripts I wrote, and the net effect was people who needed Linux for their coursework could avoid needing to head to a lab. Of course, this only worked with Windows 95/98/ME, so it was only useful for a couple of years before 2000 and XP had taken over. It's worth remembering that installing Linux used to be a lot. Partition resizing required you to defrag drives first, and risked losing all your data in the process. People were still using weird overlays that did transparent drive compression, and you were going to have a bad time in that case. X configuration tended to involve you having to manually pick drivers. Until XFree86 4.0 shipped in 2000, you had per-device X servers! Distros like this aimed to make it possible for users to actually run Linux without having to risk losing all their data and without having to know way more about their hardware than any reasonable person could be expected to (remember that we had more than 3 GPU vendors back then!), and this sort of project really set the scene for projects like Ubuntu a few years later on.