Wubi : what a cute name for a smart tool

Now that Ubuntu is out and is used my 10's and thousands of developers, its time that all users of PC also get a taste of this new desktop system. But how ? well, you
can have a Live CD, that can run directly from a CD drive, and not install anything on your windows PC. This will enable you to experiment with Linux, without impacting
existing OS on the system. all you need to do is set your boot order to boot from CD drive, and then from HDD. Even though this will work, this Live CD approach will need lot of memory, and you may not be able to explore true potential of the new OS.

So here is another very nice solution : use Wubi to install OS on windows itself. Did you say What !! yes, you heard it right, Wubi is a ".exe" file,
using which you can install Ubuntu directly on windows XP machine. It creates a temporary partition and installs complete Ubuntu along with Windows OS, and also provided a boot menu. Using this boot menu at startup you can select either Windows or Ubuntu. After running this for weeks or months, and you are completely satisfied with Ubuntu, then you can move file systems to this partition, and make Ubuntu a permanent OS you want to use. Best of all, if you are not completely satisfied, you can just delete the OS by deleting files from one place.

This is new concept and will help you install and evaluate a OS, than like evaluate and install (in Live CD). This approach also provided you full benefit of keeping both OS as long as you want, and not boot and run your OS from a CD.

You can find all about Wubi here :

Wubi Homehttp://wubi-installer.org/

Informative blog about Wubi
http://agolb.blogspot.com/2007/06/why-wubi-is-important-for-linux.html

Ubuntu and meBuntu :)

These days I am spending a lot of my spare time during weekdays on 2 very great projects. They are Ubuntu : One of the best and flexible desktop Linux solutions from opensource community. Always having Linux as a desktop solution has been a challenge due to complex installation instruction etc for regular Linux distribution.

But Ubuntu...what can I say, it is a Gem that emerged from all the research and development of highly motivated individuals. It has truly evolved as a challenger for all other Linux desktop solutions and also to "THE WINDOOOOS".

It is so easy to install Ubuntu and play with packages, and applications. There are 100's of 1000's of application now ported to Ubuntu and are "FREELY" as in
"FREE WILLY" available. And best of all is that you can just use command line option "apt-get" to download and install any app directly on Ubuntu. One other OS that tried similar approach is "Linspire" which was also named Lindows (Competitor of windows), but they make this application library as a paid service.

You can now install Ubuntu along with Windows XP directly from a tool inside windows XP ! How cool is that. No more manual partition management, boot.ini edits etc. All done automatically by this neat little tool. (Note: it is not yet supported on Vista)
Check this out : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/install.exe/Prototype


I will write more about this installer in my next blog, and interesting facts I uncovered.