Run Ubuntu as a Portable App on Windows!
My plan for this weekend was to go out and but yet another computer so that I can have a dedicated Linux box to work on. I need to have Windows on my machines simply because most of the people that I need to support are running Windows and that is what I need to keep up to speed on!
But, I am also finding that a lot of the tools that I want to use are only available for Linux. Since it takes quite a while to save up for another computer from the proceeds I make from Daily Cup of Tech, I have been struggling along with VMware versions of Ubuntu.
So, I was going to bite the bullet this weekend and take my kids’ college fund to go but a computer to put Linux on. As I was about to head out the door, I ran across something that might actually allow me to keep my kids’ college fund where it is!
Portable Ubuntu for Windows provides the user with the ability to install Ubuntu on a Windows machine and do pretty much everything that you can do on a regular Ubuntu machine! And, you can do the install to a USB device so that you can take your Ubuntu with you and run it from any Windows machine you want!
From the website:
Portable Ubuntu for Windows is an Ubuntu system running as a Windows application.This system is built with the Colinux Kernel, Xming X server and Pulseaudio server for Windows.
Portable Ubuntu for Windows is a useful tool for when you need to use Ubuntu on an machine that has Windows as operating system.
I have just started to play with it but from what I have seen, it is pretty impressive. Here are some videos of pubuntu (as they are calling it) that I have found which may give you a bit of an idea what this is all about:
[portableubuntu.demonccc.com.ar]
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6 Responses to “Run Ubuntu as a Portable App on Windows!”
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Peter Says:
April 19th, 2009 at 7:17 amI don’t use Linux much but when I do use it, it is my thumb drive version of Damn Small Linux. It can even run in a Qemu window on your Windows machine and it is bootable if configured right
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Joe Says:
April 19th, 2009 at 10:36 amWhen I tried it out, it was actually quite a bit slower than running Ubuntu in a virtual machine using VirtualBox.
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Jim Says:
April 20th, 2009 at 9:44 amAny possible solution is a sytem I have been doing now for the last six years. I have a laptop, and have purchased several hard drives and hard drive sleds for it. Whenever I want to run a particular OS, I just pop the sled it, boot it up, and bam, ready to go. New version of Ubuntu released? Whack the old version, or put it on a different hard drive and then I can configure and compare them separately. Have to support a hopeless relic who refuses to update his WIn98SE PC? Pop that HD it and go. Yeah you have to patch and update the drives routinely, but I have one laptop that can run everything from 98-NT-2000-XP-2003-several flavors of Linux without much fuss, and running in a true physical environment. You can get small hard drives and sleds cheap on eBay if you look around. I have even updated the Dell Latitude several times over the years and still been able to use the same sleds.
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Jim Says:
April 20th, 2009 at 9:45 amSorry ‘Any’ should be another…
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Patrick Says:
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:57 amI loaded it onto my flash drive and tried bringing it up on both my Lenovo (Windows XP) laptop and Dell (Vista) laptop. On the Lenovo the key mapping was quite different for punctuation characters. I couldn’t get it to run under Vista at all.
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Brett Says:
April 25th, 2009 at 1:31 amI was fairly disappointed with “pubuntu” because it behaved sluggishly, only uses 1 core of a dual core computer, and video applications looked like they were coming through remote desktop (blocky and slow). I also attempted using it as a thumbdrive app, but I couldn’t use it in a public computer lab at school because it requires admin rights to install virtual drivers I think.
I remember being fairly upset that it’s advertised as “portable” when it installs drivers and requires admin rights. PortableApps.com would not approve. When I need linux I boot into it on my windows machine thanks to Wubi. I’m not willing to risk partitioning, but wubi has worked wonderfully. For USB portability I tried the whole LiveUSB with persistence, but wasn’t too impressed when I couldn’t run updates or install a lot of things because the filesystem was buried in a LiveCD filesystem. So I broke down and just did a normal Ubuntu 9.04 install to a flashdrive. They say not to because of the limited write times on flash drives, but with flashdrives so cheap I don’t have much to lose.
You’re much nerdier than me so you probably need programming or networking tools from linux that might work fine using pubuntu, so I hope it works out for you.
