Wubi

Today I decided to try out Wubi on my Windows Vista machine. For the uninitiated, it's a great new way of installing Ubuntu from within Windows. You just boot up as usual, then run umenu.exe from the disc and go through the menu options to install it. If you then reboot your system, you'll be able to choose between Windows and Ubuntu. If you select Ubuntu, it will be installed for you and you can then boot straight into it. While it's not quite the same as a normal install, it's a lot more convenient as you can later uninstall it from within Windows. I've tried dual-booting in the past but found it a pain - this is a lot more straightforward.

I installed Xubuntu, and I was impressed with how well it worked. Then, on a whim I decided to skin it to look like a Mac, using Mac4Lin. I had a lot of trouble with this, so I decided to switch it to Ubuntu instead by uninstalling the Xubuntu desktop and installing the Ubuntu desktop in its place. After a couple of hours work I had pretty much nailed it.

I'm very impressed with the end result. It's not exactly the same, but it is pretty close - see what you think:


I think I'm going to keep this Ubuntu install on here as I have in the past been using VirtualBox as a test bed for messing around with Linux, but that's somewhat limited. I think this will be better for tinkering, and also so I have a Gnome-based install to play with - KDE is great, but it will no doubt do me good to check out what Gnome offers as well. Also, that's the computer that my music is on so I've installed Amarok and set Ubuntu up to mount my Vista partition automatically so I can listen to music in Linux.

All in all, Wubi is very impressive. Only problem I've had is when I installed Gnome Do - it seems to be a real memory hog, worse than Firefox ever was. Anyone else had this problem?