Ubuntu Windows Installer + VMWare 2

[Harsh Gupta]

Hello all,

I am looking for your suggestions. I wish to use Linux but I am little paranoid. I have this HP laptop with not really great configuration. This is HP Pavilion dv6500 series laptop with 1.5 GHz Pentium Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM and nVidia GeForce 8400 GS graphics card running Windows Vista Home Premium.

I own this laptop for past 2.5 years and had pretty much all important stuff on it, like Visual Studio, MS SQL Server 2005 (complete installation) and used IIS extensively.

On Linux, I am planning to install Netbeans (Java IDE) and Oracle server, and PHP + Apache + MySQL (probably later on, but anyways I will).

Initially I tried using VMWare 2 and create virtual Linux machine. But had 2 issues: (though I was not able to install Ubuntu properly)

1) I was not able to run my internet wi-fi connection along with VMWare. Dunno why?

2) VMWare, without any virtual machine, took about 1.5 GB of RAM.

Later on, I found a Linux Windows Installer on Ubuntu site which says that this will create Linux partition with dual boot capabilities.

My issues/questions are:

1) Ubuntu Windows Installer: Has anyone used it before? Is it safe to use? I just don't want to mess up my whole setup of Visual studio, sql server etc as I don't have Windows OS at my disposal right now.

2) My university is providing access to many MS products including Vista, Win 7 etc (some kind of alliance with MS). I am planning to download them and clean format this system. This system came with recovery partition and I burned it on DVDs. Just wanted to confirm if this is OK to destroy this partition? I know I am contradicting my previous statement, but that was aimed at installing Linux now while formatting can wait till I get some free time.

So what will you guys suggest? Using windows installer for Ubuntu or using VMWare? And what are your thoughts on formatting this system when I have Win OS ISO Image in hand? I am on my own right now and not in position to pay anything to anyone if something goes wrong.

Thank you.

[Harsh Gupta]

Ok, I used VMWare Player instead of VMWare Server and have successfully created a virtual machine of Ubuntu.

Yet, I would like to have your opinions on the 2 issues:

1) Windows Installer for Linux like Wubi.

2) Shall I go forward with formatting my system and delete the recovery partition?

Thank you.

[tr333]

The Ubuntu Windows Installer you are referring to sounds like Wubi. This installs Ubuntu into a file on the windows partition, and modifies the windows bootloader to allow you to boot into Ubuntu. If you decide you don't want Ubuntu, you can just uninstall Wubi from the Add/Remove programs in Control Panel.

My guess is that using Wubi will be like doing a standard Ubuntu/Windows dualboot, while VMPlayer is just a virtual machine (going through windows to access the hardware/gfx). I've never used Wubi before so I have no idea what the setup/install procedure is like, or what the uninstall procedure leaves you with.


EDIT: If you are going to reformat the whole system, you could always just dualboot Ubuntu and Windows

[Lord Orwell]

there's also a version that runs inside windows itself now. It doesn't require vm software as it comes with its own that is optimized for linux. Google ubuntu portable.

[stanav]

The portable version of Ubuntu isn't that good at all. It's very, very, very slow. It's OK to download and try out as an experiment, but I would advise against using it for any real tasks (probably you'll be bored using it within the 1st hour anyway because of the slowness/lags).

[Lord Orwell]

i didn't have any such issues with it. As long as you have hardware virtualization and enough ram it functions fine. Granted it's not near as fast as a native install, but virtual installs never are.

[stanav]

I tried it on an Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 (2.66GHz) + 3.0 GB RAM + Win7 Ultimate. It took nearly 3 minutes to finish loading (from the time the exe was launch until it's ready). Tooltips takes 5 seconds to show and doesn't close when the mouse is moved out. Clicking on any menu (Application, Places, Systems...) takes 3 to 8 seconds for the menu to show up. The menu stays open for minutes even though the mouse pointer has been moved away from it.... The lag is very serious that make me feel like the OS is crashing. It's nowhere to be compared with a naive installation.

[Lord Orwell]

I tried it on an Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 (2.66GHz) + 3.0 GB RAM + Win7 Ultimate. It took nearly 3 minutes to finish loading (from the time the exe was launch until it's ready). Tooltips takes 5 seconds to show and doesn't close when the mouse is moved out. Clicking on any menu (Application, Places, Systems...) takes 3 to 8 seconds for the menu to show up. The menu stays open for minutes even though the mouse pointer has been moved away from it.... The lag is very serious that make me feel like the OS is crashing. It's nowhere to be compared with a naive installation.

it sounds like one of your issues was you never updated the video card driver. Those were graphical glitches. However i was using it on a quad-core amd and that may have reduced any lag issues for me. I seem to recall it had an option to take over one of your cores, but maybe not. I've used so many virtual installs, i can't keep them straight any more.

Having used parallels for mac to run windows software, i can attest that the first launch of that was about two minutes as well, and this is the best one i've used in any os. my virtual pc experience in windows was downright pathetic.