Friday, October 31, 2014

Wubi for Ubuntu 14.10 doesn't work

Good news and bad news

Wubi for 14.10 now recognizes and prevents installing on computers with EFI firmware. This saves those users from going through the entire installation and ending up with an obscure wubildr.mbr error. That's good and it's my patch that has finally been promoted after a 1.5 year delay (for unknown reasons).

The bad news is that Wubi no longer works for computers with BIOS firmware either, but you'll have to go through the entire installation to find out. This seems to be due to a libparted issue in the latest version of ubiquity (Ubuntu's main installer).

So, as per my previous advice... avoid Wubi. But if you must use it, don't use 14.10's Wubi and instead see my previous post on how to install 14.04.1 Wubi.

5 comments:

  1. Well, lets fix it!
    In the wubi bug report #1385930 (comment #5) Hakuna _Matata :-) says something like:
    Just change "/bin/parted_server" and "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libparted.so.0, /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libparted.so.0.0.1" with some older versions from 14.04.

    There are download links but... I don't know how to access those files during the installation mode and where to place them.

    I love Wubi and I liked to play around with it. I cant stand all those "Be careful! Dont use Wubi! You gonna die! Aaaaaargh!" voices around me...
    Come on guys! This is nerdland! I remember all those Windows guys telling me: "Be careful! Dont use Linux! You gonna die! Aaaaaargh!" ... lets face it... Linux grew with people who loved to experiment.

    So ... back to my question ... is there ANY way to do it ... the hard and crazy way?

    Greetings,
    Ando

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    Replies
    1. Most of my time spent with Wubi has been helping absolute beginners, for whom Wubi is supposed to be "the safe choice". So my recommendation is to avoid it. For those adventurous people such as yourself, you'll do what you want anyway.

      So yes, you can totally install Wubi 14.10 - I know hakuna_matata has built a custom Wubi.exe (see here) that works. I've built one as well based on his advice, and pushed the source code to launchpad.net. So someone can download and build it themselves. I don't tend to recommend downloading unsigned .exe files from the net, but if there's a demand I would support this.

      hakuna_matata has even got an EFI version working and I've done it myself manually. So, if there's a will, there is most definitely a way.

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  2. Well, for me it worked without any problems! All I had was this error with my graphics card mentioned under the fourth point at "Boot, installation and post-install", https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseNotes

    I went back to 14.04 after.

    ReplyDelete
  3. comment peut-on avoir ce wubi14.10? merci

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 14.10 et 15.04 (ca marche avec EFI) est disponible ici (maintenu par hakuna_matata): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2251986

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