06.17
WUBI is an Ubuntu installer that enables a user to run Ubuntu without having to repartition a Windows disk. In my opinion, this is by far the best approach to allow users stuck in Windows land to try Ubuntu.
Get it here: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/windows-installer
I have recommended WUBI to many in the past, and it has always been successful. Obviously, I am a fervent Ubuntu user. But, the push for Ubuntu, or any Linux distribution, is not so much for “infecting” the rest of the world. The main reason I bring it up is for development reasons. It is so much easier to install and configure development tools in Linux, that effort required in explaining the same steps in Windows is becoming impractical.
However, until WUBI came along, the dilemma was between explaining how to install development tools in Windows, or how to install a fresh OS alongside Windows. With WUBI, it is so easy to install Ubuntu “inside” Windows that the contest is trivial.
WUBI creates a large file within Windows and installs Ubuntu into it. Then, it tweaks the Windows boot manager to allow booting into Ubuntu. When Ubuntu is running, it “sees” the the special file has its hard disk. This process eliminates the need to repartition a hard drive, a specialised activity that can go wrong even for experts.
If, by any chance, a user wanted to remove WUBI from his/her system, an uninstaller is provided, which simply reclaims the space needed by the Ubuntu files. No messy removal, no repartitioning.
With Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, it seems that WUBI is now officially supported by Ubuntu. I do not know when that change came about, but it is a welcomed one. This means that users of WUBI can expect future seamless transitions to new versions of the OS.
If you have not tried Ubuntu yet and are running Windows, I recommend to take a little bit of time (an evening) and try WUBI.
I find your comments on Dev tools odd. On my Windows XP box at work, I’ve installed two versions of Eclipse, a Java SDK, a CVS plug-in for eclipse, Wireshark, Notepad++, PuTTY, WinSCP, and a horde of other tools (latest PC, before that, many other tools including Ant, Maven and others). Along the line, I don’t recall having any problems with the installations that were significant.
What specific sorts of problems were you seeing in this context and with which tools?
I’ve found Linux to be quite a challenge for elderly folks, much like the user-friendlier Windows is. I’d like to find a Linux distro that had a simple desktop, supported simple email and web browsing tools and an MSOffice file format compatible office suite. That would be enough for the old folks.
For me, using Solaris again recently has reminded me of all the things I do not enjoy on *NIX as well as many of the powerful things that are easy to do there.
I may install Linux on one of my servers or as a small platform for development off to the side in a partition, but I can’t imagine giving up the experience day to day use of Windows gives. It’s not that it is a great OS, simply that it is an employable skill. Linux knowledge is as well, but this isn’t an either/or case, but you should know both.
I can not disagree with your comment, in that every one have their own experience and it is always best to stick to what one knows. I am not proposing to run Ubuntu for elderly, however I am considering it for my parents since they only need few applications such as a web browser and an e-mail client.
The point I was trying to make is that when it comes to development tools, I can express the whole installation of a strong development platform on Ubuntu as a series of “apt-get install” lines, as opposed to sending links to various web sites with long and tedious notes on how to install and configure everything.
The Debian packaging, which is used in Ubuntu, is such a breeze to use that it makes the configuring of a platform fairly easy. It is still not fun, but what configuration activity is? However, it is simpler than anything else I have encountered.
Now that WUBI gives Ubuntu an easy installation path for Windows users, it might become more accessible for Windows developers to try an Ubuntu platform to develop some project. I hope you get a chance to try it out.
Good luck and thanks for your post.
Thanks JP.
Sounds to me like what you are really happy with is their installer/updater technology for packages and the fact that this is in common use across the platform’s developer toolsets. Does every tool you might want to use tie into this technology? (seems they should, but I am curious)
Windows has a plethora of installer technologies because they threw that market open to competition – there is there set of tools and then things like InstallShield, InstallAnywhere, WISE Installer, etc. etc. None were so clearly better than the others that they predominate and MS, for whatever reasons, did not lock-down this aspect of the platform to allow a single installation approach.
MS, in giving freedoms of choice, and because there is no predominant solution, has created a balkanized installation environment. This does require a bit more explanation if multiple installs are required from different locations using different installers. I can see where a common installation approach would be a great simplification.
My own experience with *NIX lately has (yet again) been that simple things I want to do prove irksome to do. Some of that is the nature of remotely accessing Solaris boxes via PuTTY with all of the attendant TTY annoyances. Some of it is using command line for everything and having to remember the particulars of syntax for find, grep, ls, chmod, cat, less, more, export, bash, tcsh, vi, etc. Part of the legacy of htere being ten ways to do most things in a *NIX environment is that there are ten variants on the syntax. And key behaviours in shells, in vi, etc. aren’t identical which can be quite annoying. And trying to do graphical debugging remotely using X-Windows Servers and Clients and DBX or the GNU debugger has been another unmitigated joy. Not remotely as capable for debugging as visual studio (at least, not with the ease of use and navigation of VS) as initially installed (which is more involved than remote debugging with MS VS, oddly).