Imagine trying to expose a large number of people (people you might not know personally) to Ubuntu all at once. The logical thing to do is, of course, give them a CD. So what are they going to do with that CD? Well, almost no matter what you say or do, many of them will put the CD in the drive on their Windows computer and see what happens. When they put the CD for the current Ubuntu in, a screen will come up with an Ubuntu logo, a screenshot, and a sentence of text that says to reboot your computer to try it out without changing anything. So what next? One of two things happens. Some people will just close the window and throw out the CD and others will try rebooting. Those people that do reboot will experience Ubuntu, but it will be a slow Ubuntu where you can’t save anything to your hard drive. In other words, if you sent a current Ubuntu CD to 100 random people, you would be lucky to end up with one of them installing it.

With the upcoming release of Ubuntu, 8.04, all that (or some of it) will change. Starting with Alpha 5, this is what you will see when you put the CD in your Windows PC. “Install inside Windows” is a much friendlier option than restart your computer to try it out and installing a program is something that most Windows users can do without help. (FYI this feature makes use of Wubi, a program that lets you install Ubuntu automatically from Windows without partitioning.) While you will never get 100 out of 100 people to install it, with Ubuntu 8.04 it will certainly be a lot more likely for you to get, say, 10 or 20 out of 100.

This seemingly small feature of Ubuntu 8.04 could, in fact, make a surprising difference in how fast Ubuntu spreads.