Reilly2040's Blog

I’ve finally gotten around to testing this new version, though, as I didn’t want to resize any partitions (due to not really having time to dedicate upon it what with moving files around and the risk of file loss), with Wubi.

The Wubi installer has been something that has impressed me very much with it’s ability to seamlessly integrate Ubuntu into a Windows machine, altering Window’s very own boot menu to include the Ubuntu boot option thus removing any need to install boot or even touch the Master Boot Record. Another little wonder is that full un-installation is still under half a minute. All the uninstall program does (within Windows) is delete the addition to the Win boot menu and then delete the Ubuntu virtual disk. Clean, efficient and fast. Much easier when opposed to the sometimes lengthy process of resizing and removing partitions after an uninstall.

Seeing that 8.10 was out and that the Wubi team had already updated their program to accommodate this, I downloaded the Wubi installer (which is under a megabyte), entered my details, and let it work it’s magic.

I’m very impressed with this version of Ubuntu, specifically in it’s hardware autodetection. Whereas with 8.04 (with both Wubi and LiveCD installs) my laptop’s screen and graphics card was not detected, leading to a completely blank screen upon bootup and my having to plug in an external monitor, boot up with that attached and manually select a graphics driver that worked, 8.10 found it perfectly and I had no issues other than having to set the resolution to it’s proper setting. This laptop has a native resolution of 1280 by 800, Ubuntu decided to put it at something much higher, but I was able to change it without resorting to external monitors.

Wireless works perfectly and I was able to access my windows files easily by creating a launcher to ‘/host’ and then I simply transferred my Firefox profile.

In addition, codecs seem to be better, Div x files seem much clearer when full screened than they did with the codecs searched and found by 8.04, when they pixelated when the window was enlarged before.

All in all, I’m very happy with this Ubuntu version. ^^