download installed OS?

[orange]

I just had an idea that could help people unfamiliar with installing new OS. One could go to site, then for eg. select which OS they want, then model of their motherboard, gfx card, sound.. etc, select additional software, and then download bootable iso or something similar that would contain every driver+programs selected already installed and configured.
no need for other drivers that aren't used.
would that be too hard?

[adonay]

well there are always the legal issues whith doing something like this is next to imposible.

adonay :-D

[motorollin]

IBM do something similar on their web site. It auto-detects your hardware configuration and chooses which drivers you need. Of course, you need an OS already installed to do this, and it only works with Windows. But then, with XP it's fairly easy to get a machine up and running on the net quite quickly. With most common chipsets you don't need to install network drivers.

Nice idea though. Would be great for Linux: just tell it what model your machine is, fill in any gaps in the hardware configuration, and it makes a bootable installation disc with all your drivers on it.

--
moto

[Roman78]

That would be a great idea. But you have to get licence from the copyright holder.

I think for workbench 1.3 to 3.1 a licence would be easy to get. And 3.5 and 3.9 would it a little more expensive. Linux is GPL so that's no problem.

[asian1]

There is a research of modular Knoppix SFS from Japan.

http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/sfs/index-en.html

Other possibility: VMWare Player, Xen Virtual machine, LLVA.

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/ProjectsWithLLVM/

"In this project, we have taken our next logical steps in this effort by (1) porting the entire Linux kernel to LLVA, and (2) engineering an environment in which a kernel can be run directly from its LLVM bytecode representation -- essentially, a minimal, but complete, emulated computer system with LLVA as its native instruction set. The emulator we have invented, llva-emu, executes kernel code by translating programs "just-in-time" from the LLVM bytecode format to the processor's native instruction set."

[amigaoneproductions]

We do a very similar thing at work,  we have about a dosen different computer types (but 1000's of each one) we have an image of each system which includes all the drivers and a standard set of software used for the site.  The images are stored on a central server so all that is needed is to boot the dead machine from a DOS floppy or Boot CD which just sets up a network connection and installs the image.

Doing this for every conceivable systemboard in the outside world would be a huge task,  and as already stated elsewhere,  getting the licenses to do this would be pretty much impossible