Wubi Tuesday
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows Vista, ubuntu, linux on
“The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things: of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages - and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - and whether pigs have wings.”
Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry may have come straight from the shores of North East England, but it’s inspired much of the language -and grammar - of IT. There’s nothing more through the looking glass than writing complex pattern recognition statements in awk. There’s also nothing quite as much fun as rolling your own Linux distribution from scratch.
It used to be that you’d have to tweak your kernel for your hardware, recompiling and reloading just to make sure everything worked just fine. Then there was scripting the bootloader, making sure that all your OSes worked together.Perhaps you needed to hack together an appropriate driver for some obscure piece of hardware, before shutting down and rebooting all over again. It was a detective novel and a multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle all rolled into one.
I have a sneaking feeling that after having done all that back in the days of the 0.8 kernel and with more than a handful of Gentoo installs, I really should I be feeling a little guilty as to just how easy it was to get a dual-boot Linux install working on my main desktop PC.
I’d decided quite early on that I’d go the way of the mainstream, and try out Canonical’s Ubuntu. It’s become one of the most popular Linuxes out there, and I figured it would make a change from my usual SUSE or Fedora installs. The latest version has received plenty of good reviews, and it’s also become one of the more talked about OSes amongst my open source friends.
In the past I’d have downloaded an ISO image, burning it to CD, and booting from the resulting disk. This time, however, I decided to try out Wubi, an installer that promised to let me run Ubuntu without having to re-partition my hard drive.
The Wubi download is quick and easy, and once it’s down and installed, all you have to do is run the Wubi Windows application. It then goes off and downloads an Ubuntu install, and builds a virtual file system on top of your existing Windows partition, before adding a boot link in the Windows bootloader - and it’ll cope happily with the newer format introduced with Vista. The whole process took less than an hour, including the download!
Once it’s in place, all you need to do is reboot, choose Ubuntu from the list displayed at start-up, and you’re ready to run. There are a couple of caveats - as it’s running from a virtual disk on another file system you can’t hibernate, and if you have a power outage you stand a higher chance of getting corruption. Even so, it’s still a great way of getting started with a non-Windows OS with out the performance hit of virtualisation - and it’s easy to migrate your new install to its own real file system.
Well worth a look, if you’re curious to see just what Linux can offer you.
–Simon
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