Come fly with me

I bought a laptop a year ago and it was my first real contact with Windows Vista. I must say I am not overly enthusiastic about Vista (understatement) and I have never been quite satisfied with the laptop. It is painfully slow to use and I dread the hard drive light to be turned on because that is a bad signal.

For that reason I have for a long time been curious about Ubuntu GNU/Linux but the overhead of backing up, repartitioning has stopped me from installing Ubuntu. I have been running Ubuntu under vmware but that was also a painful experience. Then I found Wubi.

Wubi is Windows installer that installs Ubuntu without doing any changes to partitions and it is a dual boot thing. Yeah, right I thought when I read about it but I felt I had to give it a try.

The Wubi installer is a small installation program, it is about 1 MB, but of course it needs a bit more than this. When you start it you just specify some parameters and start the installation. It will download a lot of stuff, like 500 MB or something, and after rebooting the machine it will install ubuntu in a folder named ubuntu on the windows disk you specified. The actual disk for ubuntu will be a file so you will not have top performance but it is really a good way to try out Ubuntu and it really lowers the threshold for trying it out.

I know that all things does not work very well with Linux so I thought the WLan and the Bluetooth would give me a hard time. Well, I was wrong. When booted up I was informed that there were some proprietary drivers for my wlan and my graphics chips which I installed. The wlan was up and running after configuring without any problems. Bluetooth worked like a charm.

My only worry now was the mobile networking dongle I have, although I have read that there is good support for the Huawei E220. Well, this morning I got it working so now there is nothing really stopping me from migrating to Ubuntu all together, and I will.

For me it has been a revolution. My laptop is flying with Ubuntu.

It has never been as fast as it is today and it feels like the usability factor has increased even though I go from Windows Vista to Linux. That feels strange but I think that Linux has come a long way when it comes to being usable for ordinary people.

So if you are curious about Ubuntu and you are stuck on a Windows machine, try Wubi. If you decide that Ubuntu is nothing for you, just boot up Windows and uninstall Wubi like any other Windows program. No worries.