Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Installing Ubuntu 14.04.1 with Wubi

Some people still want to install Wubi. Even though I would say that it's not supported. Not really. But it's still produced.
So what happened with 14.04 and 14.04.1. First off, there were some problems because the root.disk is always mounted ro (readonly), and then remounted rw (read-write) during the boot process, but starting with 14.04 the readonly option seems to be applied to the creation of the loop device, and this doesn't allow remounting as read-write. So 14.04 fails to boot unless you change the initial mount option to rw. (Hold down Shift key at boot, edit the grub entry. Ctrl+X to boot. Not pretty.)

And then the devs forgot to produce the Wubi.exe for 14.04.1.

But still some people want to install it. Here's how:

1. Download the ISO for Ubuntu 14.04.1
2. Download the Wubi.exe for Ubuntu 14.04
3. Save these in the same directory
4. Turn off your internet connection
5. Run Wubi.exe and complete the install (WITHOUT REBOOTING)
6. Turn back on the internet
7. Reboot.
8. Let Ubuntu install and reboot
9. Select Ubuntu from the Windows menu, and hold down the SHIFT key
10. Press E to edit the ubuntu entry. Change the readonly (ro) to readwrite (rw) as follows:

Change:
linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-32-generic root=UUID=55B018A020A3F99A loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk ro rootflags=sync quiet splash $vt_handoff

To read:
linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-32-generic root=UUID=55B018A020A3F99A loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk rw rootflags=sync quiet splash $vt_handoff

11. Hit Ctrl+X to boot
12. Save yourself some bother and modify the script /etc/grub.d/10_lupin so that you don't have to do this everytime you boot. Instructions here: Ubuntu 14.04 not booting after error message. /tmp could not be mounted

That is the simplest fix, however it's best to patch the file /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local as shown here (run update-initramfs -u afterwards).

Edited 2014-11-07: corrected description of why the boot process fails with the ro option

12 comments:

  1. Very useful: I had to do this to upgrade and finish my 12.04 Wubi installation to 14.04!

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    Replies
    1. I still dont get how to download it

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  2. First time to try ubuntu and it does not work, windows may suck but at least it works out of the box.

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  3. why its always difficult with linux? I cant just install the damn thing without complications...

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. This method does not work anymore :( (I tried it with the newest Wubi downloaded from: releases.ubuntu.com/14.04/ )

    Any ideas?

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    Replies
    1. I would use hakuna_matata's version of Wubi. He has built various versions that work with the latest releases and also work on EFI firmware. See here

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    2. For me, it worked as fine as before in the beginning of this year!

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  5. Windows may work "out of the box", but try installing it inside of linux :-)

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  6. Windows may work "out of the box", but try installing it inside of linux :-)

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