Install Linux from Windows With Wubi — No Partitioning Required
The latest version of popular Linux distribution Ubuntu (8.04 — Hardy Heron) will include the Wubi installer, which makes it possible to install Ubuntu from within Windows. Even better, there’s no scary repartitioning of the hard drive. The Linux file system is installed as a disk image on top of the Windows NTFS system. Read more about Wubi on Linux.com.
It’s not a new idea — the Slackware distribution included something superficially similar called UMSDOS back in the mid 90’s. The Linux file system was represented by a bunch of MS-DOS directories under a directory usually called ‘Linux’. Whatever UMSDOS did made those Dos folders look like a Linux file system when booted into Linux. Cool, but slow and prone to file corruption. Monkey Linux was a dedicated UMSDOS distro I tried back then.
Then there was Phat Linux (and Peanut Linux, and others), which mounted an Ext2 file system image on a “loop device”. It was less messy and more stable than UMSDOS, but with the same idea — run Linux without repartitioning the Windows drive.
It’s nice to see this functionality now available on a mainstream Linux distribution. It’s a great way to try out Linux without worrying about screwing up your Windows installation. I’d like to play with it, but I’ve already got an Ubuntu partition on my laptop — and limited hard drive space.
You can download Ubuntu 8.04 Beta and burn a cd. Or even easier, you can just download the Wubi installer from here, and run it from within Windows (no cd required).
