You now have no excuse!

The aim of this installer is to provide an easier way for a Windows user to install Ubuntu without having to know how to burn a cd iso, set the bios to boot from cd, repartition the disks, set up a multiboot system, etc. It will not replace any of the current Ubuntu installation options, and will not require that windows is installed prior to the installation of Ubuntu.
The installer works by creating a disk image of a pre-installed ubuntu system on the hard disk (downloaded with a bittorrent downloader integrated into the installer, or a standard http download when we find mirrors), and then installing GRUB for windows, which can be chain loaded by the existing boot loader, and which then loads the linux kerner and initrd from the ntfs partition. The initrd is modified to support mounting the image file mentioned above as a root file system, and then continuing the boot process like a normal installation.
This does not use a virtual machine to run linux on, so the performance of the resulting system will be similar to the performance of any other linux installation. The system will use ext3 in the image file, so users will get all the benefits of a linux filesystem.

I used to use BeOS this way - mounting a virtual drive image under Windows and booting into it. It works well and you get good performance. For a while last year I was running Ubuntu under VMWare and you feel the virtualisation performance hit. I'm off to try this on a machine at home (that currently dual-boots). My MacBook is rapidly running out of disk space.....!

The best reason yet to use Ubuntu

....in layman's terms, buyers of retail copies of Windows Vista will be able to transfer their software to a new machine only once. If they want to move their software a second time, they will have to buy a new copy of the operating system. If you buy your computer with the operating system pre-installed, you are not permitted to transfer it at all.

Given that neither my three month old laptop nor my ten month old graphics card at home are man-enough to run the aero-glass GUI I don't think I'll be embrassing Vista any time soon!
When I look at the number of corporate users who stuck at Win2k I can't help feeling that (aside from OEM copies on new machines) sales of Vista may be disapointing. The hardware demands are outrageous which confirms the old adage; What Mr Otellini giveth Mr Gates taketh!
Can anyone at Microsoft write code or do they just bolt objects together?

Ubuntu and Your iPod

Well, you will be happy to know that Ubuntu does iPods, even Nanos. You will also be happy to know that using your iPod on your Ubuntu system is quite easy. All you have to do is plug your iPod into one of your computer's USB ports, after which Ubuntu will automatically mount it and place an iPod icon on your desktop (Figure 16-1). Yes, no longer do you have to mess around with mount and unmount commands or editing system tables. Just plug in your pod, and Ubuntu will do the rest.

I don't have an iPod but this is the kind of thing that might persuade me!

Killed the GUI in Ubuntu?

I did! Actually I was doing a patch-update and the battery on the Dell Latitude died. Subseqently I couldn't get the thing to boot to Gnome. Booting to the command line and doing an init 5 produced only the "brown screen of death"!. However - as with any Debian Linux you can run the patch-manager from the command line;

apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

and all is well!

Skype under Ubuntu

Hmmm - to get Skype working under most Linux distros you have the choice of using the old-skool OSS (Open Sound System) or the newer ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). I've never got anything running properly using the OSS-driver! The problem with the laptop I'm using is that it only has USB1.1 ports and so my US-Robotics handset wouldn't work properly either! Enter Skype 1.3beta which does support the ALSA driver and all is well.

Automatix 6.1 for Ubuntu

"Automatix 6.1 is now stable (works on both Breezy and Dapper x86)". This will install a plethora of software, codecs, and plugins that many users manually download and setup themselves after installing Ubuntu.

Laptop re-pave & Ubuntu

I don't know why I let it go on for so many months! Suffering the pain of a Windows install that is over a year old is unnecessary and easily rectified by a repave. I don't know what detritus the Microsoft OS accumulates but my laptop was taking eight minutes to boot to the desktop - now I run lean and mean and don't have any extra garbage that I don't need. The computer is no slouch - 2Ghz P4 with 2gigs of RAM - but after a complete reinstall I'm down to less than a minute!
I also took the opportunity to try out the new version of VMWare. I put Ubunutu in there (I find running Linux in an emulator, although slower, is less hassle than dual-boot). It's pretty good - I was a bit doubtful about Ubuntu "root-less" operation but it does seem to work with the sodu tool.

VMWare supplying pre-built Ubuntu virtual machine

Virtual Machine

Ubuntu is a free, open source operating system that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability (it should "Just Work", TM) and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of support for every release.
Instructions

1. Download your pre-built Ubuntu 5.10 "The Breezy Badger" Linux Virtual Development Environment.

2. To run this pre-built virtual machine, download VMware Player. VMware Player is free software that enables PC users to easily run any virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC.