After being less than encouraging about WUBI

It sounds like a woman's name, spoken with a lisp. I was probably being grumpy because of illness.

Anyway, Randall suggested Ubuntu and WUBI together. Bearing in mind that Ubuntu 8.04 has been out for about 2 days I thought I'd give it a go last night. In addition, WUBI is supported and recommended by the Ubuntu people, and isn't (as I imagined) a flaky independent add-on by a couple of guys in a dark room somewhere.

WUBI is a small program that runs under windows which creates a Linux partition within a windows partition and automatically installs Ubuntu, sets up the bootloader etc. You choose the size of the partition and the place it's created (I bunged it on the Samsung drive) and it installs a bootloader that is run AFTER windows begins booting. To install you can either use the Ubuntu CD (download the iso file and burn your own) or if it can't find that it will try to download ubuntu direct from a mirror.

My first go wasn't successful as I had both WUBI and the Ubuntu ISO file on an external hard drive. Of course as an ISO the data weasn't visible to WUBI so it tried to download the OS, which I stopped. D'oh. I un-installed WUBI, burned a CD, popped it in a drive and then re-ran WUBI. It found the CD, asked me how much space to use (default 15Gb) and where to install, user ID and password then just got on with it.

After around 10 mins it asked me to remove the CD and reboot. A menu was offered after starting to boot to carry on to XP or start Ubuntu. On selecting Ubuntu it completed the install, taking around 15 mins more. Bear in mind that if you were installing on an older system it might be quite a bit slonger - I'm running 4Gb RAM, and that Samsung drive is really quick.

Install completed, one more reboot, select Ubuntu and it worked first go. Firefox beta 3 v5 is the default browser - no IPv issues here, and it worked from the start. It also detected I had no proprietary drivers installed for my graphics card, and offered the option of downloading and installing automatically, which I accepted. One more reboot and it's all there. The reminder then popped up to tell me I was using non-open source drivers, and in fact popped up after EVERY boot. Hope there's a switch somewhere to turn that off.

The good and bad:

Good - it's free, easy to install like this, quick, seems to have automated driver installation (one of the most awkward areas of Linux for years)and is very functional. By reputation it's the easiest to use, most friendly version of Linux available, and it does have a warm, fuzzy, friendly feel to it.

Bad - screen fonts are, frankly, just frightful: all smeary and blurry. I used the correction tools built in (Mandriva used to have them - now does it automatically) and it became bearable but not good. Fonts in Mandriva are MUCH crisper - I'm using a syncmaster 206B 20" LCD at 1680X1020 and in windows the fine dot pitch makes for very clean fonts. Mandriva shows some of the smear issues, but nothing like as bad. I may try to import the imported windows fonts from Mandriva to Ubuntu. Another irritation is the lack of joined-up control, where each time you want to alter a key setting you have to log in as root instead of just working through something like the Mandriva control centre.


Based on my experiences so far, there seems to be a trade off between display quality and stability in Linux OSs (don't ask me why!). Sabayon is still far and away the best in terms of appearance, with the sharpest fonts, coolest interface, but is way unstable. Mandriva is second, with OK fonts and crisp, clean interface that feels like a marriage of OSX and XP. Ubuntu threw no glitches in the short time I tried it and has a pleasant feel, but I'd struggle to spend a day working in front of that display.

Guess that's sealed my pigeon-holing in the backwaters of geekdom.