Bad experience

Yesterday I managed to install Ubuntu 8.04.1 using Wubi, I made a 15GB partition which I could had deleted anytime I wanted to. So, I went and installed all the updates took a while then I was done.

I have to be honest, the Live CD ran faster than the complete installation itself. I couldn't get the WiFi drivers to work even tho I followed up a guide that was posted here. Boot time took a really long time (2 - 3 minutes vs vista's 40 second) and that really disappointed me. I wanted to try Ubuntu since it was one of the most noobie-friendly distros out there and plus I'm tired of Windows (Have had windows since I had memory).

So, is there a way I could love Ubuntu as much as I love (compulsorily) Vista ? I just want to try something new and nice looking, plus I don't game in my netbook at all (Maybe solitaire and a n64 emulator).

 

I've never installed using Wubi, but Ubuntu (and Fedora) both boot in less than a minute for me. FWIW, I installed both from USB keys (started with the live CD and followed the instructions to put in on a bootable USB key). My guess is that your system is hanging looking for a wifi connection - it'll time out, but I believe the default is something like 60 seconds.

 

Doesn't Wubi run from some sort of disk image? I thought the whole advantage of Wubi was that you could use it to try out linux without the risky business of resizing partitions and demolishing your windows install.

Booting involves lots of reading from disk: all sorts of kludgy scripts in /etc/init.d/ among other things.
The point I'm making is that accessing a disk image is slower than an actual partition.

 

Wubi is SLOW! I tried it on the default XP installation, liked what I saw, didn't like performance. I wiped out XP, installed a Vista/Ubuntu dual-boot and I'm loving it. A dedicated installation is much happier. There's a good chance your 15GB image got spread out over a massive fragmentation(part of the reason I dedicated a partition to it.

 

I'd do that. But if I wanted to wipe out the Ubuntu partiton, could I just extend the space left from Ubuntu from Vista ? Or would I lose that partition space?

 

Most simply, yes. All you'd have to do is unallocate the partition and merge it into the NTFS partition. It'd probably just be easier to set the Ubuntu partition as a separate NTFS drive. Merging is just a pain in the butt.