Windows based installation of Fedora Linux?

King InuYasha ngompa13 at gmail.com
Thu Sep 13 00:25:07 UTC 2007


Well, I have actually used Wubi a few days ago on a recently purchased
family Vista (blech) laptop, and I really haven't experienced any issues
with it. Actually those FS issues in NTFS have nothing to do with Wubi in
particular, but rather with the way fragmentation in NTFS is and how it
affects disk images and vice versa (at least from a user PoV I can explain
it, i know no technical details about it). Whenever you have an NTFS
partition with files that are large compressed filesystems (any form of
compressed tree, e.g. tarballs, disk images, ISO, zip), fragmentation occurs
more rapidly and FS degeneration seems to become more likely. This issue is
less likely on ext3 in my experience, but it is still possible. This issue
is probably why FAT32 has the filesize limitation it does. NTFS probably was
supposed to fix that, but obviously didn't. Though those are merely
speculations (regarding the whys about design). Anyways, that is my educated
uneducated opinion :)

And anaconda does support completely automated installation (kickstart
files!), for the others, someone else needs to answer....

On 9/12/07, Ago <agostino.russo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Since I've advocated a win32 installer for Fedora in the past,
> > I'll at least say - cool.  Unfortunately I also don't forsee myself
> > having time to dedicate to this in the near future(nor the desire, as I
> > am and hope to stay winblowz free ;).  But I hope someone else finds the
> > time :)
>
> Good questions. There are in fact 2 separate issues.
>
> 1) Hosting filesystem corruption (ntfs). We had a few reports where people
> were
> not able to boot into Windows after an hardreboot in Wubi. Filesystem
> corruption does happen when you hardreboot, whether you use Wubi or not.
> Sometimes you get lucky (also with Wubi) sometimes you do not. The real
> question is whether Wubi (ntfs-3g in this case) makes things any worse. On
> average, we have 1 such report every 10K downloads. Add that Wubi users
> tend to
> reboot more often than usual, since they are in a new environment and
> often
> they do not know how to get out of a real or apparent deadlock. So are the
> numbers we see physiological? Honest answer is that I have no clue. I
> discussed
> that with Szaka (ntfs-3g author) and according to him, ntfs-3g does not
> make
> things any worse and there is little to be done on his side. If you have a
> different opinion on this I would like to hear from you.
>
> 2) Hosted filesystem corruption (ext3). When Ext3 writes the journal, the
> data
> does not end up on the HD but gets handled by ntfs, which in turns may or
> may
> not write the data to the HD. So if you hard reboot, data loss in the
> hosting
> filesystem may cause journal corruption of the hosted filesystem, which
> makes
> recovery quite challenging. This is not an ntfs/ext3 specific issue, you
> would
> have that in any nested filesystem configuration (or at least this is my
> understanding). What we have done was to tweak sysctl dirty settings, so
> that
> dirty pages are flushed to disk as often as possible. That seems to have
> done
> the trick. Since we did that, I cannot recall any complaint due to ext3
> data
> loss, but of course that does not eliminate the issue.
>
> On top of that we cannot hibernate/suspend. Suspend-to-ram is a problem
> because
> of the ordering in which userspace processes are terminated/resumed which
> becomes an issue if you use a userspace filesystem (if the loopfile is
> hosted
> on vfat, suspend works fine). With hibernation you also have to handle the
> issue of having swap on a file.
>
> My take on all this is that Wubi is a "short term" installation. It's good
> enough for a few days and far more captivating than a live CD or a VM. But
> it's
> not ok for data-sensitive situations or for long term use. I would use the
> word "demo" if it did not have a try-then-pay connotation. And yes,
> because of
> the above, some users will be left with a bitter taste in their mouth, and
> the
> reputation for reliability will be negatively affected. On the other hand
> you
> will be able to reach many users that would not dare to try Linux
> otherwise,
> you will provide Joe Average (read 90% of the users out there) with a
> one-click
> installer and that helps a lot when you have to bear the stigmata of being
> seen
> as a "difficult OS".
>
> It's a trade-off.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Ago
>
> --
> fedora-devel-list mailing list
> fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
>
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