That's exactly the kind of complicated, nerd talk that made me shy away from Linux this whole time. Can you make it SUPER easy for a spacker like me please?

In 99% of cases it will do it all for you. If you're scared, run it in a VM.

I find Windows a much bigger mess to deal with when it goes wrong TBH.

All this talk of bootloaders sounds a lot more scary and dangerous than it actually is. Don't panic.

Firstly, some explanation of what the options are:

• A quick glossary:
  
  
  • When booting, the BIOS looks at the first sector on the hard disk - this is the "Boot Sector".
  • This first sector contains the instructions on how to boot up the operating system.
  • These instructions are the Bootloader: a simple program that starts your main operating system e.g. NTLDR in WinXP, GRUB in Linux.
• What a Full install does:
  
  
  • The Installer wipes the Windows bootloader from the boot sector and stores its own (GRUB) instead.
  • The Linux install will automagically detect your Windows install and put it as an option in the Grub Menu.
  • If something goes wrong, it's dead easy to fix by putting the Windows loader back.
• WUBI Install:
  
  
  • In a WUBI install, Ubuntu is installed as a Windows application.
  • It uses a virtual disk and so does not require its own partition(s)
  • Ubuntu is listed as an option in the standard Windows bootloader

Secondly, some thoughts on what I would do. If you're only dabbling with Linux, I would probably try the WUBI method on the new machine. That said, however, the time to fettle with operating systems is when it's brand new and has no data on it. It all depends on how much you think you'll want to use Linux and also on how hardcore you want to be.

Does this help?

Wonderfully succinct *and* informative. Thank you.

No problem.

Let us know how you get on.

I might have missed something, but what about the Wubi installer?

Here's the link, complete with bad song lyrics... Wubi Wubi Wubi Wubiiii

I have used this a few times, and never had a problem with it.

Hope this helps.

All this talk of dual booting, nobody has mentioned running Ubuntu in a virtual machine.

As long as you have more than 2GB of RAM and at least a dual core processor, running Ubuntu in a VM would be a lot more convinient and less hassle. The biggest problem with dualbooting is, that you are never in the OS you need! With the VM, you can run both at the same time...

VirtualBox is fine, although I personally splashed out on the desktop version of VMWare for my iMac.

Update:

Installed WUBI last night on this machine. No adverse affects thus far. Got Ubuntu to see my media and play some music and movies. Although it struggled to play 720p on VLC, which XP manages fine with the same hardware on either VLC or my preferred client MPC-HC. It was interesting. Kinda Mac-like in layout/simplicity (and therefore lots of differences for me), but I got somewhere with it. Kinda liked it, but it wasn't liked it "just worked". And I'm not sure if I have the time to fiddle whilst I'm out here, because I have to work a lot and I need things to be up and running for the brief gaps that I get.

That said, the first look impressed me enough to be intrigued and WUBI is definitely a cool idea. We'll see how I get on, and maybe I'll update you all on my progress....

Sod that, install Ubuntu and run Windows in a VM. It's probably safer to run Windows in a sandboxed environment anyway!

Just to qualify things a touch, this machine is a netbook running 2GB of ram, VMing Windows installs is probably not going to go terribly well...

VMing anything on <2GB RAM is probably not a good idea, unless you intend to run something like Puppy Linux...

Whenever I get back to the UK. I'm genuinely gonna take a machine with no data on it and I'm gonna try a clean install of Ubuntu and nothing else. I think I might like it. But for now WUBI is definitely the best option for me, if at all.

Nobody except, err, everyone


However, WUBI sounds like a really good choice.

Your Linux talk always helps rusty.

Ooooo Matron!

[/Kenneth Williams]