I decided about a week ago that when the latest release of Ubuntu came out that I would give it a whirl. I have had some experience with Linux in the past so I figured it would be a breeze. On Thursday I downloaded the latest release(7.10 Gutsy Gibbon) but I didn’t have any time to go about installing it. On Saturday I went to burn the image to a cd but it appears my cd burner doesn’t want to read or write anymore. I decided to give Wubi a go. I have heard so great things about it and some not so great things. Wubi creates a file on your Windows partition that will house your Ubuntu install. There are some downfalls such as slower disk speed access and it is very prone to hard reboots.

Overall the install with Wubi went well and soon I was cruising along. Personally I didn’t notice any slower disk speed on my 7200rpm hard drive but I wasn’t using it that long. I figured I might as well download the updates and then upgrade to 7.10(Wubi is still using 7.04 with 7.10 being alpha). This was a big mistake. If I had read the support forum beforehand I would’ve known not to upgrade my install like that. I was left with an unusable system. I decided that since I was going to use LVPM anyway, I might as well just use my disk with 7.04 on it.

To shorten this up a bit, I installed 7.04 and resized my hard drive. This drive was partitioned as NTFS and contained my media (videos, mp3s and all my backup data). The resize and install and upgrade went very smoothly and I was once again dual booting WinXP and Ubuntu.

In the next article I will address issues with Ubuntu, such as the monitor resolutions, package installations, compiz fusion, etc.