"For Windows users I'll show you how to get a basic Ubuntu Linux system up and running in a virtual machine so that you can still do all of my exercises, but avoid all the painful Windows installation problems."
A bootable Ubuntu USB stick with persistent storage might be easier to get started with? Can be created from a Live CD.
Interesting idea.
Things that annoy me about Ubuntu dual boot
* My Wacom tablet is terribly hard to configure on Ubuntu. * Flash support seems to be hit or miss in terms of out of the box functionality. Sometimes it works right when you install chromium, sometimes it doesn't * Windows weird partitioning. Windows will only let you have 1 or 2 of these special types of partitions on your HDD, and I somehow maxed out that partition count and couldn't fix it. It was very difficult to work with.
I was thinking more of a group of people meeting to work through the Learn C the hard way book, perhaps in a coffee bar or something, bringing their own laptops. A bootable stick might make a C environment more accessible to them.
The puredyne project produced a bootable linux specifically to provide a common environment for training in audio production. Seemed to work for them.
But I've heard Vagrant is good for use cases like yours, though I haven't personally used it.
That sounds like a fun activity by the way, have fun with that :)