This summer holidays, I’m going to run an experiment. Could Linux, Ubuntu specifically, become my primary OS?

Currently my primary OS is Windows 7 and I run Linux as a virtual machine using Oracle’s Virtual Box. But, could it be the other way around?

In order to find out I’m going to install Linux on a notebook and force myself to work on it for a few weeks.

I’ve purchased a small (120GB) SSD disk for the notebook because once you have experienced one, a spinning hard drive feels like a 56K modem. Also the notebook is rather old (Dell XPS 1530), so this bump in speed is going to be a must if I want to work with Windows under Virtual Box.

Just to demonstrate than a SSD is the best upgrade you can do to your computer, this is the time it took Ubuntu to boot and let me type my password in both a regular hard disk and in the new SSD:

Seagate Momentus 7200K: 45 s.

OCZ Vertex3 120GB: 17 s.

Worth it!

Installing Ubuntu

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on this laptop in less than 8 minutes. Awesome!

Then I installed Virtual Box and create a Windows 7 32 bit VM. I gave it 60 GB, half of the disk drive. It’s unlikely that I will need more than 40 GB on Linux, but Windows installs tends to get out of control.

Once I installed Visual Studio and finish configuring Windows to my needs I took a snapshot and put it in a safe place. This way I have a fresh install and I can avoid the tedious of installing everything and in the future.

I will be using this laptop for the most part of August, will see how it goes.