New feature specifications: install without configuring the BIOS

[Toby Smithe]

On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 11:30 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 03:14:42AM -0400, t u wrote:
> > Peter Garrett wrote:
> > > On Fri, 6 Oct 2006 16:24:44 +1300
> > > Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at canonical.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > >> On Oct 6, 2006, at 6:34 AM, David Balazic wrote:
> > >> Some measurable percentage of them will, and then they'll get confused. 
> > >> They thought this CD would let them try Ubuntu *without* nuking their 
> > >> Windows installation, but apparently it doesn't.
> > >>
> > > Indeed - remember that for many WIndows users "install" means "make this
> > > program usable for me *in Windows* " - they may have no concept of what an
> > > operating system actually is, and then get very upset when the "Install"
> > > button does something they were not expecting at all.
> > 
> > I am imagining a portable qemu on a CD: portable ubuntu (like portable
> > firefox) from inside Windows. I'm just imagining.
> 
> This would be quite possible to implement, but we've never bothered with it
> because it's also incredibly slow (CD + hardware emulation = very poor
> performance).

I understand that the CD is slow, but what is the status of QVM86 on
Win32? I would have thought, should this be considered, that that be
chosen to do the virtualisation (so no real emulation has to be done).