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I didn't manage to boot from SD-card reader in my netbook, so I just used Wubi to install Ubuntu Netbook Edition (10.10). The system works smoothly and I'm glad with it, but there are certain perfomance problems: with Eclipse and also when there are lots of tabs in Chrome opened.

I'm thinking now about having a "normal" Ubuntu install, but I'm not really sure if it helps me. I don't really want to set everything up again after reinstalling the whole system, so I'm wondering if I really should try to get rid of Wubi and is there any simple way to do that with keeping all my settings.

Thank you

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1 Answer

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To my experience there are some problems that cannot easily be overcome in Wubi installations. These mainly come from the virtual Wubi file system residing within the Windows file system. If anything goes wrong with your harddisk most likely all of your Ubuntu files are completely lost. Recovering encrypted file systems is almost impossible from Wubi installations.

In addition, there have been problems in the past upgrading Wubi installations.

To avoid these it is IMO better to have a proper install of Ubuntu either in a dual boot setup or, if you don't need Windows too much let Windows run in a virtual machine within Ubuntu and share files that are stored in the Linux file system.

There are many recipes of how to migrate a Wubi installation to a proper Ubuntu installation. However you might find it more convenient and less time consuming to just backup and restore your /home folder when you haven't installed many non-standard software packages.

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thank you. what should I backup besides /home/ ? I think there can be some settings files stored elsewhere – valya Oct 26 '10 at 19:27
Most settings should be stored in /home but mind to include hidden folders e.g. ~/.evolution. System configs may also be stored in /etc. It may be wise you test your backup prior to deleting the original files. – Takkat Oct 26 '10 at 20:54

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