[sf-lug] One Click Ubuntu install ... from Windows

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> It's an idea we had under the name "umsdos"
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMSDOS) all the way back to the dawn
> of Linux.  Early distros such as Yggdrasil and Slackware offered that
> implentation of the idea as an installation option, for example, back to
> '94.  People stopped using it because it was fragile and performance
> sucked.  I imagine those concerns still apply, in any similar
> implementation.

Upon looking _this_ implementation up, it turns out to be a loop-mounted
vfat filesystem, i.e., an imagefile of a vfat partition that's been
mounted with the loop option (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_device), 
the way one loop-mounts a CD-image file one has created before burning
it to media, to verify that everything looks OK.

As with UMSDOS, there's going to be a whole lot of overhead associated
with those extra layers, and with the sheer inefficiency of also dealing
with the host OS's file access.  Nice little trick, though.