Ubuntu 11.04 on Wubi with Windows 7 - FAIL

Previous: Ubuntu 11.04 installation

Recently I joined a company as a consultant, and the job requires frequent travel. The company laptop runs Microsoft Windows 7, and some of the company's software tools require Windows. I wanted to have some personal computer time while on the road but I didn't want to have to take two laptops with me, so I decided to install Ubuntu 11.04 under Wubi on that machine. This is a Dell Vostro laptop.

I was never able to get 11.04 to run properly after a Wubi install. There seemed to be some problem related to the video driver. Unfortunately, I could not get to a command line prompt at all. Once the machine reached a certain point in the installation, the display just displayed multicolored garbage or part of a memory dump, and did not respond to the keyboard or mouse.

I did not want to mess with the partitions on that machine, since Windows tends to be very sensitive to that sort of thing (see [blog post link]. Instead, I downloaded VirtualBox and installed 11.04 in a VM. It's functional, but doesn't take good advantage of the host system's video adapter. It won't even run Unity, thinking the "hardware" isn't up to the challenge.

One strange thing...after installing and creating a user account and so forth, when I restarted the guest OS it always wanted to install Ubuntu from scratch. I never found a good reason for it, but when I deleted all the Virtualbox log files (but not the log directory), the problem went away and the guest OS came up normally. After Virtualbox wrote to its log files again, the problem reappeared. Therefore, there did not seem to be any way to establish a reusable Linux instance. Every time I started the virtual machine I had to install Linux again. This is not especially useful.

Due to the issues with a Wubi install of 11.04, I decided not to upgrade the Acer Netbook. It happily runs 10.10.

Next: Windows 7 boot menu issues