Installing UBUNTU in win7

I need to install ubuntu 9.10 for my project at college.I have win7 and win xp dual boot installed right now on my acer aspire 5738g laptop.

ubuntu 9.10 has an option of installing on a separate drive using a bootable cd or it can be installed inside windows,from windows just like any other game.I wanted to know whether both modes of installation are the same? will i be able to use al d features ? and how shud i configure the boot loader which already has win 7 n winxp as the 2 options


P.S it can be either win 7 or win xp,i need to install ubuntu in any one..

Tews said:

Yes either will work for your purposes.... Btw, I would strongly suggest a course in sentence structure and spelling...

thx but what about the bootloader? and I write in bullets or different paragraphs because people usually don't bother reading a whole paragraph.Pardon the occasional commas being misplaced.

As you have a Acer Aspire 5738g noteboot, take look at this:

Important notice from Acer. (3410 & 5738)

I would personally suggest downloading Sun's virtual box and run Ubuntu as a virtual machine. It installs 10x faster, has ZERO chance of FUBARing your W7 install, the VM runs very close to full speed, and you have the ability to install multiple distros, save them and when you enevitably screw one over (and you will) you can quickly restore aprevious version in a flash.

[Edit] Oh and also you get cut and paste of files between windows and Linux and all kind of other goodies :)

The only reason NOT to do this is esoteric hardware access. Like requiring broadcasting on TCP to work or something.

theog said:

As you have a Acer Aspire 5738g noteboot, take look at this:

Important notice from Acer. (3410 & 5738)

I'm sorry,but that information you provided is for the overheating of the adaptor or palm rest.I'm not getting the connection between Ubuntu and the link.I am a newbie to the world of laptops.

fseal said:

I would personally suggest downloading Sun's virtual box and run Ubuntu as a virtual machine. It installs 10x faster, has ZERO chance of FUBARing your W7 install, the VM runs very close to full speed, and you have the ability to install multiple distros, save them and when you enevitably screw one over (and you will) you can quickly restore aprevious version in a flash.

[Edit] Oh and also you get cut and paste of files between windows and Linux and all kind of other goodies :)

The only reason NOT to do this is esoteric hardware access. Like requiring broadcasting on TCP to work or something.

thanks fseal,but I am new to this,don't quite know how a virtual box functions and not sure about what my project requirements would be,so I would be requiring all the features including the TCP you mentioned.I wanted to know how to get the bootloader to show all the 3 os in my system after I install Ubuntu 9.10 in win 7 or xp

You do get normal TCP networking, serial ports, CDROM if you want.

I mentioned TCP broadcasting but it's really only used for local network service discovery and not used much on Linux normally at all.

Setting up the virtualbox I found to be quite a bit easier than even setting up most distros native. The video, sound and networking are all almost 100% guaranteed to work right off the bat whereas it's a real crapshoot of debugging after a native install, frequently having to hand edit the x config files to even get the GUI working :/ (I've installed dozens of versions of distros over years and years and it's always a crap shoot, even today)

Virtualbox and VMware have made my multi platform linux development insanely better.

I don't know how to properly get dual booting working with Windows 7 but I have read a LOT of horror stories about W7 and Linux installs wiping out each others boot records. Something I battled with a lot in XP but it reads like W7 is even more finicky than XP/2k were... I'm not keep to try it myself

One thing you can do to avoid the problem which I ended up doing with native installs is I have a ton of old HDs around and I put my OS drive on a drive tray and I just swap out my Windows drive for DistroX when I need to work on it and that way not have to deal with the constant booting issues (Course I always had at least 6 distros going at once so is just made sense to have it that way anyway)

But I cant explain well enough how great it is to have cut and paste working between windows and Linux machines and be able to run one program on windows and another on Linux at the same time on the same machine...

hey thx a lot fseal,I decided to go with the virtual box.My laptop is acer aspire 5738g and I have installed win7 n winxp dual boot. It says win 7 is a 64 bit operating system.I want to install Ubuntu 9.10 on win xp using virtual box.

1. which version of virtual box do I need to download?

2. the partition space used while setting up Ubuntu using virtual box is used from which part of the hard disk?

3. If the whole process doesn't work out for me,can I uninstall virtual box just like any other software from control panel and will I be back to normal os again?