Your instincts are correct Seeker, read this quite famous article, entitled "He who controls the bootloader"seeker wrote:Sometimes I get the feeling that MS is going out of it's way to put up road blocks for the average Joe wanting to contaminate their computers with another OS.
http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
Basically, this "strategy" from Micro$oft, along with strong-arm tactics on computer suppliers and manufacturers, is what killed off the otherwise technically excellent BeOS from IBM, their main competitor at the time. Luckily Linux programmers are clever folk and tenacious with it. As Ive said do not underestimate the importance of what you have created, Micro$oft have always been afraid of a fair fight and youve just brought it to them. Dont be expecting a christmas card from Bill this year
Ive used the installer on about three or four xp-only installs now (single hard disk) and so far each one has been flawless...many thanks for this seeker it really has made life easier.
From my own experience, the incentive for people with new Vista computers to switch to using Linux is quite a bit higher than with XP/2000/98. This is because with Vista they have to learn a new interface anyway, plus most are extremely dissatisfied with the Speed. Ive had the pleasure of cleaning many a Vista install for these reasons.
Im picking up a copy of Vista tonight to do some tests with this installer. I think the worst thing that could happen is that people try this installer on Vista and it causes their new computer to "not work". I want to check and see what it does. Im hoping there is a check built in to say "This installer is only for 98/2000/XP" and quit out.
Should it include that then I think its safe to put it on general release (www.download.com, www.puppylinux.org etc!). Vista support is a "nice to have" for the moment, but perhaps if you upload some more details of how exactly the installer works, someone else may be able to add the modifications needed to add it.
Just a few minor issues...today I installed XP on an already puppied computer (puppy 4.2.1/2.15ce grub dual boot install whole hard disk) . I used gparted to resize the main ext2 partition and create some free space at the end of the hard disk (it wouldnt let me resize from the beginning), then in the XP installer I told it to install on this free space (hda2 in Linux-Speak). As usual it overwrote the MBR so when I rebooted it automatically started XP (yuk!), and for some reason XP claimed to be using E: as its installed location but apart from that ran no worse than it usually does.
I then installed the Puppy-Win32 installer, hoping that it would restore at least my 4.2.1 access but no luck. It did install a dual boot menu upon startup. The option to start Windows worked fine, but the option to start puppy brought up this error message.
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Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.
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[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
e:\grldr="Start Puppy Linux"
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timeout=10
default=0
title Puppy-Linux installed 07-08-2009
kernel (hd0,0)/puppy/vmlinuz psubdir=puppy
initrd (hd0,0)/puppy/initrd.gz
boot
I realise this installer will be fine for the people that just have an old computer with XP/2000/98 (by far the most common case), so Im only relaying this information to give you ideas for an updated release. It is already a fantastic piece of work that will open up access to an alternative operating system to far more people than any amount of extra packages, libraries, drivers or kernel updates....bang on the button when it comes to achieving puppies goals/mission. Well done Seeker