On 14/12/12 08:40, Rohan McLeod wrote:
"Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess.."; the idea occurred that MS might eventually replace or augment Windows; by building it as a GUI plus a Unix / Linux kernel, in the way Apple, now builds the Mac OS as a GUI plus a highly configured FreeBSD kernel (or whatever);
To a degree, Windows is already quite minimal and modular. For example, every recent version of Windows has a small ~165 MB bootable image located in C:\Recovery (.wim files are used for ramdisk images) that is a bootable Windows PE environment containing a fairly complete set of command line tools, as well as enough GUI tools to recover a broken Windows system. This base environment is also enough to run most Windows software (look at tools such as PEBuilder, which is able to produce a bootable .iso containing a WinPE image, plus software you want installed). Though Windows is by no stretch POSIX compliant, most would argue that is not necessary attribute anyway, given the huge breadth of server applications chugging away happily on Windows boxes. (You and I would disagree on that, but this *is* a Linux mailing list. Meanwhile, the rest of the world keeps on spinning.) Deployment is also modular -- "Dism" is a recent package management system for adding/removing Windows components. [0][1] And of course, Windows Installer can be fully automated/managed too. Used wisely, these two tools can be just as powerful as any Linux package manager. Basically what I’m saying is that changing to a model with a minimal Linux/Unix base wouldn’t gain anything, because they already have a minimal modular system to that does everything that Microsoft needs it to. -- [0] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824821.aspx [1] Oh, Dism can also manipulate .wim and .vhd (VM image) files directly. Sort of like chroot package management without actually needing chroot.