

And there will be absolutely no Terminal commands required. Oh, also, with this version of Ubuntu, all of your hardware should work out of the box-your mouse, your wireless Internet, perhaps even your printer. Now, before you run for the hills after seeing the word “ BIOS,” know that the tweaks are very minor and totally reversible. The downside: you’ll need to use a USB stick or SD card at all times and you’ll need to make some changes to your BIOS setup. But since you won’t be running a machine within a machine, you won’t have as much performance lag. This method has the benefit of being completely separate from your system disk, and is therefore 100% safe, like virtualization. So, with all that being said, here’s a third method for installing Linux: booting from a Live USB. The virtualization route is much safer-I’d even venture to say it’s 100% safe-but you’ll need a fairly mighty computer to run it at anything close to full speed ( forget about virtualizing on your netbook or aging Windows XP PC).

But due to some of the complexities of how Wubi integrates into your system disk, there are still some risks to your Windows installation in the event of a crash. Dual-booting is the easiest method, after the initial setup, since it doesn’t require any bootable media.

The two methods outlined by Dex definitely have their strengths.
