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My brother is afraid of windows malware and all that mess in the Windows World. He has a laptop with Windows Vista, and afraid to use internet banking and such in this machine.

He can't use Linux (he needs microsoft office), so I suggested to use a Ubuntu Live CD instead when needing to enter sensitive information somewhere.

But, I've come across Wubi:


You can install Ubuntu as a "program" in windows. This approach is much better than the live cd, so my question is: which risks are involved in using this Wubi approach? From both malware do Windows disk corruption and such? (Doesn't matter if the Ubuntu becomes corrupt since its only going to be used to internet banking, I'm afraid about his windows files)

And, more interestingly: how do I make a Wubi installtion to "reset" itself (return to previous state before login) like the live cd, so everytime he logs into the Wubi Ubuntu, it's a fresh install, avoiding firefox history, etc?

EDIT: About "locking" the system, there's something called gofris that does exactly that. Pretty interesting!

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Installation of ubuntu as wubi does two things. First,It downloads, and decompresses the installtion to disk images, then it adds it to the bootloader. It isn't part of windows or a regular windows application, other than the uninstall undoing both those things.

Other than that and the inability to suspend, it would be pretty much a stock install of linux, as it was a real system

If you wanted a non persistant install, unetbootin may be a better option. It'll simply make a livecd to boot from the usual bootloader. You would need to do some initial setup - perhaps off a wubi-ed install of ubuntu, converted into a livecd using remastersys, and booted from unetbootin

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Apart from the suspend issue, the filesystem access will also be slower in wubi (since it is not a native filesystem). –  Vinay Jun 10 '11 at 9:00

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