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Thursday 26 June 2008

Wubi and Ubuntu

When I grabbed a cheap Thinkpad T42 laptop off of Ebay last year I was really pleased. It came with a fresh install of WinXP which allowed me to cleanly partition the single HDD with Partition Magic. With the intention to put Fedora onto that new partition, and do all the Robot development under Linux.
In all the Computer Games companies I've worked for it has always been Windows based development (using Cygwin for HW vendor tool chains). A linux distro is something I had toyed with occasionally, but knew that for embedded work I should really jump ship and develop wholesale under Linux. It was quite annoying to find that the DVD drive on the laptop was flaky :( Anyway, alot of existing Virtual COG'ers, including the guys over at Virtual Cogs, use a Windows/Cygwin setup for VC development. I could have perservered with Fedora (mounting the ISO in Windows to install from, etc.). But didn't require anything else that Cygwin had, so moved on.
This week I came across something really special, namely Wubi :) It cleverly installs Ubuntu onto an existing NTFS/FAT partition. The only thing it changes is to modify the WinXP boot loader to GRUB, to allow for dual booting into XP and Ubuntu. Tried this out, and it works fantastically!! My dev laptop now has Ubuntu!!! :)

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