Wubi: Dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows Just Got Easier

http://wubi-installer.org/, http://www.ubuntu.com/- Excited for the final release of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron next month? But dreading the dual-boot setup? Wipe away your worries, in Canonical's upcoming release, you'll no longer have to go through the troubles of partitioning your hard drive or mess with file systems to set up a Windows/Linux dual-boot. Well, you still can if you want ... but now there's an alternative, with Wubi. It let's you install Ubuntu directly onto your C: drive, in a virtual disk image, right within Windows.

The first step was to download the Ubuntu 8.04 iso from (link). Now, instead of burning the iso onto a blank CD-R, I mounted the disk image onto a virtual cd-rom drive using Daemon Tools Lite. I did this because I didn't have any blank CDs on hand.

So on to Ubuntu. The first thing you'll see when putting in the Ubuntu 8.04 CD in Windows is the Ubuntu CD Menu. Here, it will tell you that you can reboot your computer with the CD in the drive to try out the Live CD and do a standard installation from there, or install inside Windows. Choosing to install inside Windows brings you to the Wubi installer. Here, you can choose how much space on your C: drive, or whatever drive you want to install it on, you want to allocate for Ubuntu.

Wubi will create a two virtual disk files within Windows where Ubuntu will be installed: a root.disk file for your root installation and swap.disk for Linux's swap partition. Once finished, it will ask you to restart the computer. After restarting, the windows boot manager pops up, asking whether to boot into Vista or Ubuntu. Choosing Ubuntu will complete the installation, and in no time, I was running the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Beta.


I felt little to no changes in performance when running Ubuntu. Of course, if you choose to use Wubi, it means that you'll be running Linux from the NTFS file system that Windows uses, which is prone to fragmentation. Severe fragmentation can reduce performance by slow write and read speeds when in Ubuntu. Other than that, it ran just as well as a standard installation.

Uninstallation is also just as easy. If you decide to ever get rid of your Linux side, just go into the program manager in Windows and uninstall Wubi. You'll then get the space you allocated for Ubuntu back in Windows.


Since I can't bring myself to only use Linux as my sole operating system, dual-booting is essential for me. With Wubi, the process has become a lot simpler, and safer than messing with partitioning your hard drive.