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 immediately, at any time, whether 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.
Frontend site for Windows clients to visit is at:
http://goodbye-microsoft.com/
Further details (screenshots, GPLed source code) at:
http://goodbye-microsoft.com/more.html