manual: Add section on supported operating systems.

Signed-off-by: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>
neox: fixed "(See @url{https://www.gnu.org/distros/} for [...]"
Acked-by: Adrien 'neox' Bourmault <neox@gnu.org>
This commit is contained in:
Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli 2024-11-24 18:10:51 +01:00 committed by Adrien 'neox' Bourmault
parent 480a338c46
commit 5affc6ec91
Signed by: neox
GPG Key ID: 57BC26A3687116F6
1 changed files with 53 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -15,6 +15,8 @@
Copyright @copyright{} 2024 Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli.
Copyright @copyright{} 2024 Adrien 'neox' Bourmault.
@quotation
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
@ -472,6 +474,57 @@ GNU Boot, but support for them hasn't been enabled yet in GNU Boot:
The GNU Boot project needs help to evaluate the impact of enabling
these and welcome contributions in this area.
@node Supported operating systems
@subsection Supported operating systems
While GNU Boot should be able to boot almost any GNU/Linux
distribution, but in some cases some configuration might be needed by
the GNU Boot user.
Even if some cases require some configuration, GNU Boot makes sure to
provide at least one way to boot free GNU/Linux distributions (see
@url{https://www.gnu.org/distros/} for more information on these
distributions) without the need to configure anything in order to make
it possible for less technical users to use computers with GNU Boot,
and even reinstall the GNU/Linux distribution without needing to do
anything too complicated.
To make that possible, the GNU Boot contributors that proposes
improvements to the project typically test GNU Boot with free
distributions, and the GNU Boot project even runs automatic tests with
Trisquel 11 (aramo), one of the free distributions to make sure that
it can boot fine without needing any special configuration from the
user.
However sometimes fully free distributions also propose experimental
or non-standard configurations for very specific use cases. For
instance Guix has experimental support for GNU Hurd, an experimental
kernel from the GNU project, and Trisquel supports the Xen kernel,
which is a virtualization solution that not supported by all GNU/Linux
distributions. These configurations are not supported in the official
installers of these distribution and so users are usually aware thaty
they use Xen or GNU Hurd. Using GNU Boot with these configurations
might require some configuration from the user. Also we would need
help from users to report what works and doesn't work or what
workarounds are needed to make them work with GNU Boot.
The cases that are known not to require any configuration might also
work with any GNU/Linux distributions (even the nonfree ones), however
the GNU Boot project doesn't want to force contributors to download or
run nonfree software to test changes, so it relies on voulounteers
already running such distributions to report bugs in case something
doesn't work as it should.
As for other operating systems, there is some documentation on how to
boot some of them (like some BSD operating systems) on the GNU Boot
website, but again we need help from voulonteers already running such
systems to keep the documentation up to date and inform us of what
works and doesn't work.
Also if you want to do such tests, you can open a bug report on the
GNU Boot bug tracker at
@url{https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=gnuboot}.
@node Helping GNU Boot
@chapter Helping GNU Boot