Not too many months ago, there was an article in it’s Foss introducing a new distro that did not require a live USB to install, one could simply run an executable from within windows and it initiated the linux installation from within that running windows session; I forgot the name of that distro and so I was wondering if anybody in the community happened to remember what distro that was?
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You can install linux from another linux
Sorry , I dont know if Windows could do this.
I searched itsFOSS and there is no article that I could find.
Basically what you need to be able to do is boot from a .iso file ( instead of a usb stick) . You can do that by configuring grub to boot from a loop mounted .iso file.
It is not easy.
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Are you thinking of WLS? Windows subsystem for Linux.
“Windows Subsystem for Linux provides a compatibility layer that lets you run Linux binary executables natively on Windows.”
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Many years ago, there was a method called WUBI. It treated a file in the Windows file system as the entire Linux file system. You could reboot and choose to run Linux or Windows. It’s been a long time, so the details are fuzzy.
Here is a link to an old site. I am guessing the method no longer works.
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Thanks! you sent me in the right direction; I will be exploring GitHub - hakuna-m/wubiuefi: fork of Wubi (https://launchpad.net/wubi) for UEFI support and for support of recent Ubuntu releases which might be compatible with the secure boot requirement of windows (can’t really turn secure boot off as this is not my laptop).
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@pdecker
I believe the last Linux distro that supported the Wubi installer was Q4OS.
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I agree. Pretty sure WUBI was dropped and no longer worked well over 10 years ago. The original anyway. I don’t know if someone forked it and tried to make it work again or not. It sure seemed useful at the time.
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Although this does not answer your question…
If you are thinking along the lines of looking to see what a distribution looks and feels like then you could try
Then if you like download and install. But still needs a live usb.
Alternatively Ubuntu allows a network installation without usb although I have never tried it.
Installation - Community Help Wiki.
Just like a Mac version offered by apple.
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