New feature specifications: install without configuring the BIOS

[Andrew Jorgensen]

On 10/17/06, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> 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).

We actually talked about this earlier this year -- including the idea
that the qemu image could be already booted and ready to go (which
would make it much less painfully slow) but that would require more
than a CD (as the RAM image alone would have to be 256MB).

Paul Sladen successfully booted qemu with the casper image from the
LiveCD back in February but it required a small change to the boot
scripts and a change to one of qemu's constants:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-February/015474.html

I still think it's a very attractive idea but mostly as a "gee whiz
wouldn't that be neat" thing.  If someone else wanted to pick up where
Paul left off and make it a reality (maybe get some performance stats)
that would be pretty cool.  Based on Paul's work I'd bet it would only
require some very simple changes to the LiveCD.