I am working on windows 10 currently. I was wondering if MX Linux could be installed directly from online. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
if i remember correctly, if you use balena etcher, you can flash an usb stick without first downloading the ISO, using the url
The question is confusing, what exactly do you mean by “directly from online”? Just click a button in a web browser and it will install the entire distro? If so, pretty sure the answer is no; if you imagine something else, please clarify.
That’s how I interpreted the statement.
Open web browser
Click install
Files down load and install. Computer reboots with Linux os installed on hard drive
I feel like you should be able to do this tbh.
I can basically do this from Linux. I could build a disk image and extract it right onto my disk and reboot and be in that new system. It would take some work to get right, but it’s basically how the rpi images work.
I think your biggest issue is making sure enough utilities were loaded in ram that you could finish the extraction before the system crashes cause you’ve deleted some important utilities.
The answer is no, because you’d need windows to allow your Linux installer to take over top runtime privilege and modify live partitions while mounted and in use. While i guess it’s technically possible, it’s so much of a hassle i wouldn’t even want to start considering it.
I wouldn’t consider this a real option in any way, but it is a fun experiment to theorycraft.
I think you are right. A little bit of research seems to show that windows doesnt allow such things.
On Linux you could make a ramdisk with like BusyBox and your new image (or new image on some other drive) pivot_root then overwrite the entire boot disk to some other disk image.
It would be a bit hairy, but could be done
That’s the reason l wish to do away with windows.
There’s WebUSB on Chromium browsers, a JS API for all kinds of peripherals. I think formatting mass storage is allowed, as long as it’s connected by USB
Sort of like GrapheneOS does, right? I don’t actually have GOS, but I thought the installer worked like that. Otherwise, there’s always the WSL that I think is how I installed Ubuntu (just as a test!!! I haven’t used Ubuntu since 2009) inside Windows 10 a few years back.
Its a different device though, you run the installer on a browser with usb access and the phone gets flashed.
Others are answering what you technically asked, but I think that’s not what you’re looking for. What you need is a ‘live USB version’, you run it from a usb stick and can try it without installing anything in your main drive.
Here is the link to the page with the links in mxlinux.com.
Now you have to make another decision, which desktop you want to use. Mx Linux’s got three, xfce (known for being less demanding on resources), kde (bit windows-like, not that resource hungry either. It’s worth a try), and Fluxbox (I don’t know anything about this one). You might as well download and try the three of them. Just flashing them to the usb to try another.
Now the process. First you need one or more iso files (downloaded from trustable sources like the one from mxlinux.org itself, you also can check the checsum, but maybe too nerd just yet), a USB stick (probably 16gb or even 8 could be enough, but I’m not sure exactly. Pick a fast one if you can, it’ll feel quite snappier. THE DATA IN THE DRIVE WILL BE LOST), and Rufus (this is a program to flash the iso into the usb stick).
Now read the pages I linked, and maybe follow the links there for explanations, I cannot tell you how to use rufus since it’s been ages since I’ve touched it, but it’s not so hard. May get a couple tries to flash the iso into a bootable usb (meaning the computer can boot or start running the os in that drive) but you’ve got this! Run rufus and flash one of the isos into the usb stick.
Now try to boot it. Look up how to get into your ‘boot menu’ (preferable if available, and it works. But it might not…) or ‘bios setup’ on the internet. It depends on the brand and model. You’ll have to turn it off, and push some key just immediately after turning it on again, with your flashed usb stick plugged. If we’re lucky you must see some text menu that lets you chose it to boot, and you’ll be running Linux in a few seconds, hopefully.
Now when you’re ready to install one of them into your computer’s drive you have two options, dual booting keeping windows and putting also Linux for which you’ll need a free partition or ssd for it, or if you are convinced of getting rid of windows for good just chose the easy formatting options while installing and that’ll be it (THE DATA IN THE DRIVE WILL BE LOST).
If something doesn’t go as planned or you have any doubts don’t hesitate to make follow up questions, it’s normal if you have to repeat some steps or search the internet to troubleshoot something, but Linux has become super easy to install and use (it really is much worse with windows or Mac…) so good luck and welcome to Linux!
Thanks for this.
Technically there would be network booting. I think it was intended to work over the local network but I don’t see why TFTP wouldn’t work over the Internet (when skimming the Wikipedia article). But be warned, TFTP (and thus netboot) has no security features, so you could receive a manipulated PXE (pre boot execution environment).
TFTP is fine for LAN, but very inefficient for sending bulk data over the Internet.
To keep things as simple as possible, TFTP sends one packet at a time, waiting for a response before sending the next packet. If your ping is 50 ms, the that’s 20 whole packets per second. (That’s assuming zero packet loss, otherwise it will be even slower.)
For historical reasons, the packet size is locked to 512 useful bytes. That puts the transfer speed at 10 kB/s (80 kbps), which is faster than dialup but not by much.
netboot.xyz grabs them from HTTPS with cert validation afaik
That is not the kind of Network boot I meant, they ride on the name for the standard IMHO
It is PXE in every sense
Adding to the already excellent answers: there is such a thing as WebFAI: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-WebFAI.tuxedo . In short, it is a web-based tool to pick and install your distro of choice.
I do not think that it will be helpful for OP, as MX is apparently not being offered. You may need a Tuxedo laptop for it as well. Hopefully other readersl will have a TIL moment though.
What’s your use case? If you want to replace Windows on your device then the answer is not really, however, if you just want a Linux shell then you can pretty much one click install a Linux distro inside of Windows with WSL2
Currently my windows 10 is running on 4gb ram. At least MX Linux would be better in this case ??
Almost every linux distro is better on RAM than Windows. That said, application memory management has gotten pretty sloppy over the past decade or so. I boot into MX linux (KDE) on my 16GB RAM laptop, and I am using about 2GB after boot. Once I load my password manager and open my browser (Librewolf with 18 tabs) I am sitting at 5.4GB used.
But! Even when this laptop had only 4GB RAM, it always ran MX fast and never complained about low memory.
Edit: Try the xfce version of MX linux. I think it’s the lightest on resources, or it used to be.
I would actually adopt the fluxbox, because l wish to switch over to evilwm eventually.
You can download a Linux distribution from the Internet, but you must use a tool like Balena-Etcher or Ventoy to “mount” that distribution (typically in the form of a
.isofile) to an external media, like a USB flash drive. Then, you’d boot your system into that USB to install the Linux distribution to your machine.I don’t think there is, the closest would be a net install release but MX doesn’t appear to offer that.
So, what would be the next best option to install MX ?
The only way to install another OS on a windows computer is to flash it to a USB drive using a tool like rufus and then rebooting the computer with the usb drive plugged in. There are probably some obstacles in place, if your computer does not boot into the installer you’ll need to go into the BIOS (usually spamming del or esc while the computer is booting) and change the boot order (make sure usb drive is at the top) and possibly disable secure boot.
If you replace windows with linux you will lose all your files. I’d recommend you first try Linux in a virtual machine, though this might not be an option with your limited RAM. If you’re new to Linux I’d also recommend starting with a different distro that has a larger community so you can easily get answers when you run into problems. I started with Ubuntu, its not the greatest distro and I jumped ship as soon as I was able, but it has dedicated community forums full of all the answers you’ll ever need.
I want to clean up the entire system actually, and bring it to 0.
I think - and believe me, it wouldn’t be the first time I encounter this - that OP assumes Linux is like an app in Windows or Mac. Ao, grossly oversimplifying, Windows, MacOS and Linux are today’s most popular operating systems. An Operating System or OS is software that sits all alone directly on top of the hardware; therefore, a computer has only 1 OS. These are not interchangeable either, ie you cannot run Linux as an app in Windows or vice versa. Now, what you can do is download an image of any OS online. An image is in the end just a storage device copied into a zip file with a bit of extra data, that you can “unpack” back onto a storage device that can be used to boot your computer, just like windows.
Which would be the most convenient way to install MX Linux ?
Make a bootable USB with your distro of choice. To do that download the .iso file and use a tool like balena etcher to write that iso to a flash drive (4 GB is usually enough for this). Be aware doing this wipes everything off the flash drive so back up anything important. Reboot the computer and mash esc, f1, f2, f11, f12 (those are the most common ones I’ve noticed). You should either pop up into the bios or into a boot selection process. If you’re in the bios just tell it to go to a boot menu, if you’re in the boot menu pick your flash drive and run through the steps there.
Why did I only see this after all my typing
I would start trying it out. Download the image, get an empty usb stick of serious size (32GB or more, up from 8 should be no problem though if you can find it) and use eg Rufus Disk Imagerto install it on the usb stick. When done, restart the computer i to the bios or boot menu (look at the message when starting, f1 f2 del or enter should drop you into bios, f12 on some computers drops you straight into a boot menu).
Feom bios go to boot menu, from boot menu to usb stick and select the option “boot from usb stick”.
Note the login and password should be in the documentation close to the image.
I think this really highlights a gap in Linux adoption. This makes me wonder how many people would install Linux if they could just click one button in their web browser to guide them through the process of replacing Windows.
Ubuntu used to offer a tool that was only a bit more involves than that
the wubi installer. i remember that. installed ubuntu inside a container file and added boot entry so could choose at boot time. yea, that was never really supported when it was offered but it mostly worked.
endless os does have that option yet today. and it does work–with some caveats: it’s slow af with a hdd. well, immutable distros in general are, but this install method just makes it worse. and your windows c: cannot be encrypted (e.g. bitlocker). also be aware that the next version (endless 7) that’s in development will change pretty much everything ‘under the hood’ that makes endless what it is, as they’re moving from their customized gnome and in-house immutable debian base to an immutable based on gnome os itself.
Which distro is that ??
is what? endless? it is a distribution, produced by the endless foundation.
https://endlessglobal.com/foundation/access/operating-systemmy ‘monitor’ (really, an aio with hdmi in) runs win10/endless dual boot. this is the endless side. note the loop device in the gnome disks window, that’s the .img on c:\ that holds endless. efi grub handles the boot menu. all set up by the endless for windows ‘installer’.
Do we know why they stopped?
I’m going to guess that users lost their files and complained, so Canonical stopped trying to make it easy enough for those users to try.
probably lack of volunteers to make it uefi compatible, and not worth putting paid talent on an optional feature used by a really, really small number of people. bitlocker-as-default would have broke it for good anyway.
That’s fair.
There used to be a thing called Wubi. Allowed you to install Ubuntu basically like a program/app. It’s how I first got into it. I’d tried a little before, but Wubi allowed me to turn my little netbook it’s a Linux machine because it didn’t have a CD drive. It was great. I’ve never really understood why that couldn’t be done again. Lowered to bar to entry a great deal.
There were installers that did this in the past, it was generally not worth it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software)
Changing OS is not as trivial as installing an app, if people can’t follow the process of burning it to a USB pen and rebooting, they’re not going to be able to adjust.
The issue here is if you can’t be unassed to learn how to install Linux what are you going to do when you have problems. There’s a web installer for GrapheneOS it could probably be used as an entry point for someone to create the same for a.distro.
You want people to use it? Make it easy. Not everyone wants to know how all their tools work and fix them on their own. Even you don’t.
Why precisely should I care if Bob from Baltimore or Tim from Tulsa use Linux?
No, the point is that we should ensure that people can use Linux without needing deep technical support.
Who’s we, you got a mouse in your pocket?
Sometimes. But I felt that I could talk for more than just myself.
I think it could work if it was a paid or had a service contract that insures support from creator so the person can have someone to help diagnose and correct things for a few months after install. Like I said in my initial comment GrapheneOS made it work but they only support a few generations of Pixel hardware desktop Linux supports most hardware going back 30 odd years it would be a nightmare.
Yep similar to steam os / steam deck. It’s really good user experience, ticks all the boxes of what a lot of linux evangelists claim the windows will all want to switch to . It’s even surprisingly usable in desktop mode (with mouse and keyboard).
That’s what you can do with linux on defined hardware and with a dedicated team paid by a fairly large corpo making cash out of the users.
But the linux user base is way more diverse than that - not everyone is going to want graphene , or steamOS type thing. especially not just to pander to windozers.
macOS, but only on a Mac
on enterprise, HPE has a similar solution with through iLO, which is not free, of course
