Re: SEUL: hardware detection

[William T Wilson <fluffy@dunadan.com>]

On Mon, 19 Jan 1998, Kai Wetzel wrote:

> While I agree that we should make it easy to switch
> from Win/'95/dos to GNU/Linux, I think it's 
> psychologically bad to assume that Linux is a secondary
> OS in the long run.  About two years ago I bought a

Yes.  Some sort of ability to "absorb" a discarded windows partition would
be very nice.  :)  And ways to import Win files, and so on.  We will have
to discuss this at more length...

> distribution for about $40 and couldn't install it
> on my box because it didn't include a boot floppy :(

Doh.  Well, if we ever get to selling box sets, I think that we should not
make such a foolish mistake.  :)

> install people tend to forget that they probably never
> tried to install '95 (dos) on a machine with an
> OS on the HD.  At least my version of '95 does not

No, it's not designed for it.  95 will destroy it, unless you can trick
it.  But this requires BIOS manipulation; but if you trick Win95 into
installing onto the second hard drive, it will happily write its demon
bootsector onto the second hard drive where it does no damage.  :)

> So I think that we should try to make installing
> Linux on a naked machine just as easy (it could

Yes.  I don't want to give the impression that I advocate requiring
windows in some way, which is the impression that is getting out.

I simply believe that most systems will have Windows already isntalled, so
we should cope with it gracefully, and that Windows is a useful source of
system information.  But it need not be a necessity.  If it's gone, we'll
live without it, as all distributions do already.

> I've heard it's possible to boot from CD nowadays ?
> Is this a common feature ?

Most new systems can boot from the CD.  My system which was made in
January of '96 has this ability, and it was one of the first that could do
it.  Most systems made then in the past two years can boot from CD.  It is
a function of the BIOS, and it requires an IDE CDROM (usually).