init6 Technology

I found this on Digg this evening and thought it was a great idea. Apparently, Debian Linux has released a frontend install loader that runs from Windows. It was adapted from a similar project for Ubuntu (which I was unaware of). You can even visit a website to directly start the process.

Here’s the details straight from the horses mouth, so to speak:

“This is the announcement of “Debian-Installer Loader”, a win32 loader for
Debian Installer.Overall, the process is very simple (it’s been inspired by a similar
project with Ubuntu). D-I-L runs on the users’ win32 system,
auto-detects whether the CPU supports 64-bits, picks the appropriate
linux and initrd.gz images for netboot, and uses GRUB for DOS to
chainload into it.

This has a few interesting applications:

- Migrating to Debian on hardware without CD drive (or USB boot capability).

- Migrating to Debian for users who have no idea how to burn an ISO
and/or how to configure their BIOS for CD boot.

- Migrating a system to Debian inmediately, at any time, wether
we have a boot CD at hand or not.

- Advocating Debian to Windows users. Rather than give them a CD
(expensive), give them a piece of paper with an URL.”