This is a tutorial I have been meaning to write for a long time, as it is something that I use very regularly, and cannot imagine being without - a local mirror of the complete Ubuntu package repositories, stored on an external USB Drive.

This is where we make the newly created User-Mode Linux system really useful - networking it to the outside world. This enables your virtual UML system to behave as a completely independent system, as if you had 2 (or more!) computers, all running inside a standard Ubuntu Linux system (Intrepid at the time of writing). All without large or expensive virtual machine systems.

In the previous post we compiled the UML Kernel and installed the tools required for proper functioning.

In this post I will show how to create a basic root file-system that can be launched by the UML kernel to give you a fully functional Linux machine, running inside your normal (host) system, but fully isolated and independent.

In the first (brief) part to this series, I mentioned what User-Mode Linux (hereafter called ‘UML’ in all the tutorials) was, and gave a link to the website. In this Tutorial, I will show how to compile a UML Kernel from the standard Linux source code.

I have already talked at length, over several posts, about using ‘coLinux’ to run a fully independent version of Linux from inside Microsoft Windows.

Now, I’ll take a look at a different way to virtualise your Linux experience – User-Mode Linux. This allows you to run a (pretty much) fully functional instance of Linux under …. .Linux!

If you have followed the previous posts in this series, you will now have a working coLinux system, running Ubuntu 8.10 Linux and updated to the latest development versions.

When we created the root file system, we made it 2Gb in size which was fine at the time. however, we may want to install more programs, do some development work or may just find this too restrictive. We have 2 solutions to fix this :

1. Add a second virtual hard drive to the system. This is probably the easiest - we create another empty file, assign it to an unused cobd number, format and then mount it under coLinux.
2. Physically expand the current system, without losing any data or requiring a re-install.

The second option is the one we will discuss here.

To continue our series on coLinux, we will update (coLinux, not the embedded linux image) to the latest development version.

There is now an installer to do this easier, but we will do it using the individual downloads to ensure we understand what is going on.

Many people would like to get started with Linux, but are put off due to the fact that they use Windows XP or similar on their PC and do not want to change completely.
The solution to this is to ‘Dual-Boot’. This is quite simply to have 2 totally different and separate operating systems installed on your computer at the same time. For example, I have Windows and Ubuntu Linux. However, this is often quite complicated (and scary) for some people - partitioning drives, possible loss of data, unable to boot back into windows.

Enter Wubi. This program will install Ubuntu as a second operating system next to Windows, but will not require any partitioning of hard drives and is completely automated and safe. It can even be uninstalled using the standard Windows Control Panel!