Out of curiosity, I wanted to find out how much of time time I could spend using Ubuntu. I am not about to abandon Windows 7 entirely as there are too many applications on that platform that I use (including Adobe’s CS5 suite) but I’d realised that I spend most of my time working in a browser these days.
Here’s the best way to do it:
- Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/windows-installer and click Start download. This will download the Wubi installer for Windows.
- If you’re using a 64 bit processor (you almost certainly are) then Wubi will, unfortunately, install the 64 bit version of Ubuntu which the makers of Ubuntu themselves say is not for “daily use”. The problem is that drivers (relatively scare on Linux in the first place) and programs often only exist in the 32 bit version. This happened to me and I was forced to reinstall. To force it to use the 32 bit version, simply download the 32-bit iso image from http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download into the same folder as Wubi.
- Run Wubi. You may well get a message about being unable to find drives. This is likely to be because you’ve got a built in media card reader. Simply click Continue time and time again until it goes away and all will be well.
- Reboot. You should see a text menu with your current Windows installation as the default and the new Ubuntu installation. Select Ubuntu and follow the steps through to complete the installation.
You’ll find most of the commonly used applications have already been installed (including OpenOffice) but to add more software go to Applications > Ubuntu Software Centre and do a search. You can find the Flash player and Filezilla there, for example. Google Chrome can be installed from within Firefox. Tweetdeck is slightly more involved but full information can be found by searching their user forum (hint: do not click the Install Now button as it doesn’t work).
.gif)