Linux desktop variations
After playing with Debian and Ubuntu, I wanted to see what the latest in KDE looked like. I have mostly been a Gnome user and had read some interesting tidbits on KDE 4.3 in LinuxJournal. I did not want to “polute” my Ubuntu installation by downloading all of the KDE parts to it. So I decided I would add a Kubuntu partition to my Ubuntu box. I would do this as well as test Kubuntu on my 64bit Windows machines using Wubi.
I was surprised to see that the installers for Ubuntu and Kubuntu are not really from the same code base. The installation on my 32 bit Ubuntu box went off without a hitch. I had a spare drive on it and I used that for the new partition. I needed to manually change the partitions with the partition manager. This is so it could leave the old Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 versions where they were. Even this was simple and straight forward.
Wubi letdown
I guess my biggest surprise was that Wubi does not install Kubuntu/Ubuntu to run “on top of Windows” as I thought it would. I had thought there was an additional VXLD layer or something that was written to let Linux run as a guest OS on top of Windows XP. This would have been really cool. Sort of like Cygwin on steroids. This may sound ridiculous, but a colleague long ago, Bill Thompson, wrote such a VXLD for Windows. He did this back in the mid ’90s that allowed x86 versions of Unix to run on top of Windows.
I searched around the web and Facebook and LinkedIn to see if I could find Bill. With much digging I found him on LinkedIn. His start-up was called “nQue”. He was also a file system guru that wrote a lot of CR-ROM file system drivers, etc. after the start-up went south.
Needless to say, I think if that feature could be added to the Wubi concept, a lot more people might try Ubuntu. Adding it right on their Windows desktop as an application environment without requiring a reboot. I know Wubi does not alter the Windows partitions. So it is still a fairly painless way to try Ubuntu without risking much. Users can always uninstall it as they do any Windows application it if they are not happy with it. I just prefer to rarely reboot my systems if I can avoid it.
