The month of May for me had a unusual amount of business travel – I logged well over 25,000 flight miles. In a perhaps unauthorized move, I purchased a cheap netbook and left my gigantic Dell laptop at the office, using webmail to hit my corporate exchange mailbox. The netbook was dreamily easier to carry around and worked like a charm. It came with Windows 7, and I knew I couldn’t let that last for long once my travels were over, but I’ve been a little hesitant to commence an OS install.
I’ve been an incurable Linux fan since 1993, when I installed slackware on a 386 – it was really *not easy* – I had to feed a bunch of floppies and compile a kernel and all that goes with that, but it was definitely worth it. Installing Linux has been getting easier ever since — zoom ahead to just now, early June 2010.
I did a web search and found Wubi – a windows program you download and run, which then downloads the latest Ubuntu and installs it while you watch. The install was so easy I barely remember it – I specified the amount of space on the hard drive I wanted to use, supplied a password for my account (the installer used the account name I had used for windows), and that was about it. After watching it go for a few minutes, and a couple of prompted reboots, here I am in ubuntu, making this post from the already installed Firefox. Now I have dual boot – I can go to Ubuntu or to my existing Windows 7 install. Nice!!!
