One thing I forgot to mention in my description of the X60s was that I took my first swing at Wubi yesterday. I’ve never really had the occasion to use Wubi, because I haven’t had a Windows-based machine in the house in so long. I knew of the project and I knew of the principle, but this was an introduction.

And for me it actually worked — I say “actually” only out of surprise, not out of any disrespect for the application. The slowest part of the installation was the actual downloading of the ISO, which seemed to be getting rather weak connection speeds. I wanted to kickstart that process by dropping an ISO into the directory for Wubi (I keep a few backup ISOs on an external drive, just in case), but I couldn’t find the target location, so I just let it run.

After that it worked quite well. I like that I had the choice of operating systems at startup, but I disliked that I had to also tell Grub to boot (I know, that’s the default behavior for a dual-boot system in Ubuntu; there are ways around that). Aside from those miniscule startup points, there’s little difference between running a “classic” dual-boot system or one injected with Wubi. For my money, at least.

It may have been my imagination, but I could swear that running Ubuntu through the NTFS file system was a little “groggier” than usual. I don’t hold much love for Gnome Ubuntu anyway, but I have since cleaned out that Windows-grafted system and built a pure default ext4 system, and everything is a tiny bit snappier.

I should probably expect that though. I can be fairly certain that the tech staff at the store where I bought this didn’t install Windows XP with speed in mind, and that coupled with my own prejudices against Windows and its inability to satisfy, and I shouldn’t be surprised I sense a certain slowness in a split installation like that.

No matter. I doubt it will be often that I find myself in a situation where I will be running both operating systems on this machine. I had no issues using Wubi to half-step into a Ubuntu installation, and move me a little bit closer to a full, Linux-only arrangement. In that sense, I give it a thumbs-up. 🙂