If you want to install ubuntu 7.04 Feisty, but you don’t want to modify your Windows partition and you want to install it inside, Wubi is for you. According to its website:
Wubi is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a few clicks. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application. If you heard about Linux and Ubuntu, if you wanted to try them but you were afraid, this is for you.
Moreover, Wubi doesn’t need you to replace the default Windows bootloader, as “Wubi adds an entry to the Windows boot menu which allows you to run Linux. Ubuntu is installed within a file in the windows file system (c:\wubi\disks\system.virtual.disk), this file is seen by Linux as a real hard disk.” Then it loads the file as a loopback root Filesystem, kind like those described in “The Loopback Root Filesystem HOWTO,” but with the loopback filesystem is actually in Windows’s partition.
Since Wubi makes Ubuntu run inside Windows partition, there will be a little bit performance penalty, especially when your Windows partition is fragmented. Moreover, if there were any error in the ntfs partition that affects the system virtual disk, you need to fix the errors with something like chkdsk in Windows first before booting Ubuntu. If you’re not afraid of partitioning, I still recommend you to install Ubuntu in a separate partition.
We know that we can kill Linux by running the command rm -rf /, but this can’t be undone as your files are gone. Here’s a quick way to make your hard drive look like formatted and how to undo that easily (tested under VMWare with ubuntu), click each picture for more information.
First back up the first 10000 bytes of the hard drive and then replace it with empty data.
Everything seemed to be OK and we could still shut down normally, but……..
After we restart, it won’t boot anymore with an empty MBR and all the partitions are gone! To fix it we need to boot from a boot disk and restore what we backed up.
After all this it everything worked again. Now restart and check it…
Inspiration from my very sad personal experience:
Once upon a time I thought the first 512 bytes of hda1(where my Windows is installed) is the MBR but in fact it’s supposed to be the first 512 bytes of hda, I ran the command “dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1″ and thought this would reset the MBR, but the Windows partition is ruined instead!
If you really want to test out or use a program that might be potentially unsafe, contain virus, or do something you didn’t expect, but you don’t want your computer to be hurt, what should you do? Here’s some tips to do it safely.
for both Windows and Linux you can make a Windows virtual machine with VMware and make a snapshot before testing those programs, if something is wrong with the program you can go back to the snapshot.
For linux users there’s even more options, we could test the program with a non-root user account, but still you might want to create a new user account to test it if your own user account has many datas because some programs might destroy datas that they can access.
For advanced users they can use other options like make virtual machine with user-mode kernel or mount with unionfs to test the program with a virtual root account.
For Windows users running programs with limited users might help, but most Windows programs won’t run properly under those accounts, for now the only solution that I can think of for this is VMware. You can also track what the program does by using Filemon to monitor file changes, Regmon to monitor registry changes, and Urlsnooper to monitor the url the program accessed, or any other utilities in addition of those mentioned above.
… “If Linux runs on every architecture, why should another operating system be in its way? ” …
Afraid of installing linux? Want to use linux occasionally while using windows without partitioning? check out colinux, it can install and start linux from a file in windows without rebooting, unlike Vmware, it has very little performance penalty. with it you can do everything in linux under Windows, except for X.
The only thing to remind is the software is still in alpha and it might crash the computer, although for me it almost never crashed.
