So now I've used wubi to install the latest Ubuntu onto my Windows machine. Interestingly easy.
For some reason it won't allow you to set a default user password that has a space in it – but at least it tells you that before you commit the install! Otherwise a peaceful and anonymous install process, that naturally asks for a reboot when it has finished, but politely doesn't demand it.
The second-stage installer carried on happily, but it wasn't immediately obvious that it wanted a reboot, it looked a little like it had crashed. Each real boot takes a long time to get past the swap initialisation stage, but I had the restraint to leave it alone, and it eventually came up into a nice functional Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron system.
With the exception of the mounted disks, we have direct access to hardware, and have to do all the usual things to install Broadcom wireless support, bah. On my laptop there was no Restricted Hardware support required, and compiz worked well. Unfortunately, my acid test is running bzflag, and it's performance was terrible at even medium graphics levels. Perhaps I'll have to hunt down a non-free video driver … :-)
So, that was wubi installing Ubuntu. Now, what did it do within Windows?
At boot time, the Windows selection menu pops up – most of the time Windows users won't see this option. Ubuntu is listed at the bottom, but Windows itself is still the default choice.
C:\ubuntu now exists, taking up just over 8.16GB for the 8GB install of Ubuntu. There are a couple of large .dsk files in there, one for the root volume and one for swap. Under “Add or Remove Programs” there's an entry called “Ubuntu”. There isn't anything under the Programs menu, but hopefully that won't confuse anyone.
Uninstall was very quick, but left the Windows boot menu in place. Not a problem for people who have figured out what dual-boot is in the first place, I guess.
So, pretty straightforward from the Windows perspective. I don't really like dual-boot solutions in general, but this is a good one – simple, straightforward, functional. And none of that dabgerous messing around with partitioning that used to be necessary!