Last week, midway my connection flight to Educause09 I decided to crack it open and catch up on my various newsfeeds. I powered up and waited, and waited and waited. All the while watching other laptop users in the cabin type away. BTW, most of these were on XP and apparently very happy.
Within minutes of logging in, waiting for all the various start-up processes to engage, and opening up Chrome, the flight attendant chimed in, "Just to let you know, the Captain has begun our descent into Memphis International, the use of all electronic equipment is prohibited at this time." :( There had to be a better way.
What i wanted was Ubuntu on my laptop.
Running a VM within Win7 was pointless.
A dual boot was what i needed but i didn't really want to roll the dice adding a new partition to my drive.
Hanselman often sings the praises of VHDs which might be the ticket for running multiple Win7 instances or WinServers but for Ubuntu it seemed as though the simple answer coming back from the forums was Wubi.
Wubi installs Ubuntu into a folder (c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk to be specific) on your Windows partition. It then modifies the boot loader to recognize this folder. So booting to Ubuntu is just the same as with any other dual boot, but there is no need to create a new partition.
Installation is fast and painless. Booting into Ubuntu is fast. Connecting to wireless is more painless. Shutting down is even faster, which was a complaint that i had with both Vista and now Windows 7. When in Ubuntu you can reference your Windows partition via the /host and /media directories so you can reach anything on the drive.
If you're interested in Ubuntu but aren't ready yet to take the plunge, give Wubi a try.
For more reading, here's a forum post reviewing Wubi.
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