Wubi do bee do, installing Ubuntu now so easy but Hardy Heron still too hard

By Stan Beer
Wednesday, 23 April 2008 17:21

Opinion and Analysis

Thanks to a wonderful new open source tool called Wubi, downloading and installing the latest version of Ubuntu Linux is now a snap for Windows users.  It’s a pity the Ubuntu development team still hasn’t taken the hint with its latest release, Hardy Heron.

This article is not about critiquing the inner workings of Ubuntu 8.04. I’ll leave that to our specialist Linux reviewers. For all I know, Hardy Heron is the fastest, most stable and feature rich version of Ubuntu to date. The problem is for Windows users that means little if they can’t easily make the transition. And after all this time, they still can’t!

Let’s start at the beginning. Not too long ago, for the average Windows user, downloading and installing Ubuntu was a pain and even a bit scary. You had to download a 700MB ISO image onto a CD and install that on a partition on your hard drive, in the process making some slightly precarious decisions about the partition you wanted to allocate.

Then along came version 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), which not only made partitioning a bit easier for the novice user but also allowed you to boot and run Ubuntu directly from your CD in order to try it on for size. Then came version 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and the chorus built to a crescendo (myself included) that perhaps the year of the Linux desktop had finally arrived. It was relatively easy to install and, if you chose your peripherals wisely, you could easily get wireless networking and printers working.

Now we have version 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and even though I’m still only running a Release Candidate, installation and getting up and running with Ubuntu has never been easier. Wubi, a free open source tool, enables users to download and install Ubuntu in one hit, directly from Windows. No more burning a downloaded ISO image to CD. No more booting from the CD to install Ubuntu. No more disk partitioning decisions. No more Grub boot manager.

Once you download and run Wubi, whichever version of Ubuntu you choose is downloaded and installed in a file under Windows that works the same way as an Ubuntu Live CD – except it runs faster and it saves changes. Because it is installed under Windows, it can also be uninstalled in the same way as any other Windows application.