Running Ubuntu within Windows 7

I am now happily running Ubuntu in a window (or full screen) on my 17" Dell Windows 7 notebook using Sun's Virtualbox, getting the best of both worlds... copy/paste to/from both operating system and any application.

It went so well that when I showed it to my colleague at the office, he downloaded Sun Virtualbox and installed it and got Ubuntu running on his Mac computer running Leopard in a matter of minutes while we were speaking!!!

For me it was a couple of clicks and downloads, but think about the layers and thousands of hours/people/discussion/work/knowledge and innovation involved, independently unrelated to each other:

A closed proprietary commercial operating system (Windows 7), running a competitor's commercial open tool available for free (Sun Virtualbox) which enables you to run a user-friendly graphical distribution (Ubuntu) of an open source distribution (Debian) of an open source operating system (Linux).

Ain't open knowledge, open standards and open source great?

While I have been promoting open source for several years and have migrated all but one of our servers to the Linux platform, and develop all of our new web projects, I remain a regular Windows user for my Desktop computer and everyday work and leisure work.

I do have a spare notebook with Linux (Ubuntu) installed and I had Wubi installed on my last Windows Vista system. Wubi is a great little app, which enables you to configure your PC as a dual boot system, allowing you to choose from Windows or Ubuntu at boot time.

My first experience with Ubuntu on Windows: Wubi

Wubi is great in that it requires no special configuration or tweaking and installs and uninstalls just like a regular Windows App: Download Wubi, download an Ubuntu ISO installation file or have a Ubuntu CD at hand, install Wubi, choose the amount of hard drive space to allocate to it, and reboot. That's it. Whenever you reboot or power up your computer, it will ask if you want to run Windows or Ubuntu. It creates a new virtual drive partition and installs Ubuntu and everything for you. If you want to uninstall Ubuntu, just go to Windows Control Panel and uninstall Wubi like you would any other application and it will remove Wubi, Ubuntu and the virtual drive partition it created.

The problem with Wubi is precisely that, you need to reboot the computer to switch operating systems. This, of course, kept from hardly using Ubuntu on my notebook other than for demonstrations or research purposes. This was not working for me as it is very disruptive to quit all apps and reboot to go from one Operating System to the other.

Operating System Nirvana Party: Sun Virtual Box

The amazing Virtual Box app from Sun allows you to run Virtual Machines complete with their own operating system within most major operating systems. This means you can run Windows Vista within Mac OS, or Windows XP within Windows 7, or even plain old DOS or Windows 3.11 on a Windows machine. In my case, it allows me to run Ubuntu within Windows 7.

Just download Sun Virtual Box, install it and tell it you want to create a new virtual machine. You can create as many as you want and play and work with operating systems from the past and the future, without messing with your computer's configuration or affecting or uninstalling its current operating system.

Virtual Box is now a mature product with pre-selected options which optimize and pre-configure for most popular operating systems. I simply clicked on New, entered a name for my new virtual machine, chose the operating system type (Windows, Linux, OS/2 and Solaris are listed), then the flavor, version or distribution of that operating system. In my case I chose Linux and then Ubuntu 64. Next you are asked the amount of memory you want to allocate this new virtual machine, how much processing power (in multi-core processor systems, you can assign one or more processor to the virtual machine) and how much hard disk space. It creates a virtual disk and the virtual machine to use it. Next you just start you new Virtual Machine, which boots on a Window and you proceed to install the operating system on it, either from a CD or an ISO.