I’ve been away a while from the Linux community and, indeed, the OS itself for quite some time now. I think it’s the better part of a year actually and I have missed it quite a lot. So it was only natural that when I installed my brand new Samsung F1 1TB harddrive that I set aside some space for a Linux install as well.
I thought about the how and what of the installation and I recalled an application that let you set up a Linux install on top of a MS Windows installation, the application of course is Wubi Installer. What it does is quite simple but powerful, it gives you the option of installing Linux side by side with your MS Windows install without having the need to re-partition your hard drive.
The entire Linux install will reside in a directory, of your choice of course, inside your normal MS Windows directory tree on a disk formatted with either FAT32 or NTFS. It also edits MS Windows own bootloader giving you the option of booting directly into the Linux environment, so no running in virtual machines and what not, just pure (almost) unhampered Linux performance.
I can’t stress that enough I think. What you end up with is a full featured Linux install with everything that comes with that. You can install new programs, store documents, music, pictures, movies etc. and all your configurations will be saved.
If you choose to remove your installation of Linux, or you feel the need to change flavor of Linux for instance, just boot into MS Windows again and remove the entire thing through the ”Add/Remove software” section of the Control Panel. Now that’s easy!
I got an install of Kubuntu 9.04 up and running in no time at all and it feels really good :). You should really try it!
