Capsule - Programming, Linux, and Life...: Running Linux inside Windows

Yes, it is possible to run Linux inside Windows. For this, you only will have to do the following steps.

Step 1 - Install the Microsoft Virtual PC Software
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/overview.mspx

Step 2 – Locate and download a Linux Distribution

After installing Virtual PC , you will have to download a ISO image file of any Linux distribution. Here ISO image is required because the Virtual PC Software mounts the ISO image and executes it.

Ubuntu : http://www.ubuntu.com/
Fedora : http://fedoraproject.org/
Mandriva : http://www.mandriva.com/

Proceed to the download section of whichever distribution you choose, and if you are given plenty of options of types to download then look for a 32bit i386 ISO file.

As you want to use Ubuntu Distribution :

http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/sites/releases.ubuntu.com/releases/hardy/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso

Download it into your PC.

Step 3 – Start Setup of Virtual PC

Start Microsoft Virtual PC and begin the wizard to create a new virtual machine, the following images illustrate this process using recommended settings. Click Next to begin the setup process:

Select “Create a new virtual machine”:

Call this virtual machine whatever you like, for example “Linux” or “Ubuntu”:

Select “Other” from the OS dropdown menu to customize the virtual PC:

Choose how much system RAM you wish to allocate to the virtual PC, if you can spare it, 512MB would be recommended. It does appear to allocate the whole amount of memory to the software, even if you are only using a small portion of it within the Virtual PC. 512MB should be fine for users with 2GB+ of Ram, but those with 1GB may struggle to run much else in the background.

Select create “A new virtual hard disk”:

Choose a location to save this virtual drive and assign a size (dependant on how much disk space you have left). You can make up to 3 virtual hard drives, but if you wanted more drives you can always partition them to as many drive letters as required.