www.gamma.net.nz

What's the best thing about Windows?  You can run Ubuntu on top of it.

Okay, so I am stuck with a locked up enterprise computer running Windows XP (... and yes we run IE6.0).  However, when I wanted to start to learn some OCaml during my spare time on my work computer I did not want to use MS Based Technology, I am not comfortable with it as a development environment. I new I had to get some flavour of Linux on it.  Linux, for me,  is the ultimate development environment, and I prefer working with it.  At first I looked at installing into full hardware virtualisation, like VMWare, Xen and VirtualBox.  I ended up trying to install Kubuntu under VirtualBox from Oracle.  It was damn slow, my Enterprise Dell Latitude D620 has no hardware virtualisation support, so the software does it, and this tends to be real slow.  Kubuntu was painfully slow using to use and for some reason it would only run in a 800x600 window.

Then I discovered Portable Ubuntu Remix (PUbuntu).  I don't know how it works, but it's great and I'm hooked.  In summary it has the following features:

• it runs Ubuntu 9.10 on top of Windows (I use it on XP, but I think it works on all versions).
• the total size is just under 4GB, so it fits on a USB nicely - this is great.
• it runs as a standalone, no need to install anything - this is awesome.
• it looks, feels and behaves just like Ubuntu.
• it comes with Synaptic / apt so you can add/remove any software, and it uses actual Ubuntu repositories, not specially developed ones.
• it's relatively fast, you can tell it's not native, but for browsing and writing code you don't notice any lag.
• It's super stable.
• The clipboard is shared between Windows and PUbuntu.
• It uses Windows as a window manager - not the best, but it is sufficient.
• Windows file system is accessable - I don't know if this is a good thing or not ;)

One cool feature it could have is to enable hibernate  This would allow me to hibernate just PUbuntu and bring it back up again to the same place when I start it again.

I really don't know what technology it uses to do this, it's not documented that I can find. And only the sourceforge page exists, the original webpage just redirects to back to sourceforge.  But it is actually running Linux, running dmesg shows the full and typical Linux log and it says it's running version 2.6.33-co-0.8.0.

... actually a little digging shows that it is running on top of coLinux, which allows you to run linux on top of Windows.  Either way I am highly impressed and use it every day now, but not at work.