Oneric Ocelot 11.10 released

Update: Usually not much changes on the day of a release, certainly not on Wubi. However, it looks like a number of last minute changes were made, generating new revisions of wubi.exe, from revision 241 (which is the version on the current Oneiric CD ISOs) to revision 251, before it looks like they settled on release 245 (which is the version on the main Ubuntu.com download site). If you're wondering what that was all about, you're not alone, but from what I gather something to do with bugs installing Xubuntu/Kubuntu with Wubi. At any rate, my tests has been mostly on revision 241, and only on Ubuntu. If I become aware of outstanding issues, I'll create new posts to address that rather than redo my testing on multiple revisions of Wubi.

Now that 11.10 has been released there are a few things that can be documented:

Preinstalled images (1-stage install)
In the absence of an Ubuntu CD or downloaded CD image (ISO), wubi.exe will download a 'pre-installed' compressed image instead of the full desktop CD ISO. This saves about 200MB on the download and, more importantly, skips entirely the '2nd stage' install that Wubi users used to go through - a considerable time saving. Users will have to download and install some language packs separately though.

Differences
1. With the conventional 2-stage wubi install, you'd get a menu prior to the 2nd stage install - if you hit ESC during the 5 second countdown. From that menu you could select from 4 boot options, and also provide your own manual kernel boot option overrides. With the preinstalled image, this no longer works. If you need to supply kernel boot option overrides these will have to be done before rebooting by editing the file \ubuntu\install\wubildr-disk.cfg in Windows, specifically this line:

linux /vmlinuz root=UUID=$diskuuid loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk preseed/file=/ubuntu/install/preseed.cfg wubi-diskimage ro quiet splash <add options here>

Please note that if you don't have this file, you're likely doing the normal 2-stage install. For editing I recommend WordPad or write.exe as the line endings are linux style.

2. If you have Windows 7 and Microsoft Office's clickonce virtual drive Q: then you'll get a "Permission Denied" exception at the end of Wubi's windows (stage 1) installation. It's okay - it looks fatal - but it's not. Just reboot and it will work. (Note there are other reasons for getting Permission Denied - if you're unsure, review the log file wubi-11.10-rev24x.log in the %temp% directory).

3. There are still a couple of bugs on the preinstalled image. The /etc/fstab is not setup correctly, only containing a reference to the swap file, and even that is not valid (at least based on the traditional Wubi swap entry). The file system is also supposed to be ext4, but is currently still ext3. Fortunately, these 'preinstalled' images could probably be updated after release (although I have no idea if they'll be frozen like other release elements). 

FYI the current /etc/fstab looks like this:

# UNCONFIGURED FSTAB FOR BASE SYSTEM
/host/ubuntu/disks/swap.disk    none    swap    sw      0       0

It should look like this (once the image is corrected to ext4 you can adjust accordingly):

proc   /proc proc   nodev,noexec,nosuid   0 0
/host/ubuntu/disks/root.disk / ext3 loop,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/host/ubuntu/disks/swap.disk none swap loop,sw 0 0

Note: the bad /etc/fstab doesn't appear to cause any problems, at least, not that I've noticed in limited testing.

Normal 2-stage install
The conventional Wubi 2-stage install is still supported for offline installs, or when you run it from a CD. When wubi.exe detects a desktop CD ISO it will bypass the pre-installed image download (even if it rejects the local ISO it will download a new ISO).

Note: that the issue #2 for preinstalled images - the Permission Denied on the Q: drive - does not occur in this case.


Other notes
1. On Vista/Win7, when you reboot after the Windows intall stage is completed, it will boot into Ubuntu directly without presentation of the Windows Boot Manager (one-time only). This will happen even if you suffer from the bug where the 'Time to display operating systems' is set at zero (the symptom will be that it boots one time directly and after that, just straight into Windows) - for everyone else they'll see the windows boot manager at the next boot and thereafter (with Windows as the default).

2. Although Lubuntu is now an officially supported release 'flavour', and wubi.exe is included on the Lubuntu CD ISO - wubi will not support a Lubuntu install (although it is possible with some manual workarounds).

3. Ubuntu 11.10 introduces a new display manager (lightdm) which requires an update to the Wubi migration and resize scripts referred to in the Wubi Guide. These will be updated shortly following the release.

If you have any questions, go to https://answers.launchpad.net/wubi/+addquestion (launchpad account required) or http://ubuntuforums.org/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=331 (remember to prefix title with [wubi]). Also http://askubuntu.com/questions/tagged/wubi is a great resource - check if your question has already been answered first before posting on askubuntu.com.

Oneiric beta and Wubi

I've been running Oneiric on Wubi since early on in development, and it has worked very well. But a few issues have come up with Beta1 and 2:
1. Offline installs are no longer working, and
2. The new Wubi pre-installed image doesn't work properly

Offline installs
When you're testing in development, it's best to use something like zsync to keep your Ubuntu installation CD ISO up to date - it changes pretty much daily as developers release package update frequently - and if you don't use zsync you have to download the whole desktop CD image (700MB) when zsync might only need 100MB. By placing the ISO and Wubi.exe in the same folder, you can install it easily and quickly. Even if the ISO isn't the latest, disconnecting from the internet will stop Wubi trying to download the latest.

But this is no longer working since Beta1. Wubi.exe no longer looks in the current directory - it just downloads the new pre-installed image (more about that later). There is a workaround... copy the ISO to the root of a partition e.g. E:\ and Wubi thinks it's a CD and will use it.

New install method
So what is this new install method? Wubi.exe used to download the desktop CD ISO when it was run standalone (and didn't find a suitable image in the current directory or other drives). Then it would preseed Ubiquity with some special instructions to format and install to the virtual disk. This means Wubi had a two stage install - first Windows, and second, the regular Ubuntu install (ubiquity).

New with Oneiric Beta, when Wubi.exe is run standalone, it downloads a pre-installed Ubuntu image and expands that on the virtual disk. So this removes the need for the second, Ubuntu install stage. It just boots the image it downloads, and the preseed file just contains the user info, which is used to setup the users account details.

So that's great - it's quicker to boot. But the problem is it's not quite working. The swap file is no longer setup, there is no /etc/fstab so performance can be sluggish. Another bug that didn't setup the grub.cfg on the new image has been fixed so hopefully these other issues will be fixed soon as well.
Note that the preinstalled image uses the ext3 file system (Wubi has used ext4 since release 9.10) - I'm not sure what the reason for this is.

Oneiric Alpha3 Wubi

I've been running Oneiric with Wubi since early on in the development cycle - but it was an upgraded Natty. I finally got around to doing some installation testing on Oneiric - a week or so after the Alpha3 was released.

The first thing I tried was just running off the latest daily ISO. I downloaded the latest wubi.exe from here and let it download the ISO. It took a long time, probably because the bittorrent download isn't very fast when there aren't many seeds. I guess it's faster to download through the browser. At any rate, a couple of hours later, I did the install (wubi.exe and the oneiric iso in the same folder) and let it run. Once I rebooted to complete the install, it failed. Apparently the kernel and initrd on the ISO were bad as it couldn't mount my windows partition. There was a helpful message to run chkdsk /r and reboot twice into Windows, but that was wishful thinking. This is part of alpha testing - probably if I tried on Monday it would work. I'll find out later and create a bug if it doesn't.

So I decided to drop back to the alpha3. The only issue with this is that the ISO is oversized so it won't fit on a CD (and I downloaded it on another machine). So rather than burn a DVD I reused an Ubuntu USB stick I had sitting around. Note, I just copied the ISO to the root of the USB - installing Wubi from an Ubuntu USB doesn't work (in most cases), but it's okay if you just copy the ISO to the root. Note: if you're trying to install an older version of the ISO like this you have to disable your internet connection or wubi.exe will try to download the latest available ISO.

Anyway - the install went fine. The only issue was that it took a long time 'detecting file systems'. I had a peek in the logs and it seemed that it was trying to mount the root.disk, but whether this was the cause of the delay I cannot say. I'll dig into that in more depth later.

Then I ran all updates (250MB since Alpha 3 was released) - because there are some cool changes to Unity that I read about and I wanted to check out.

I've been running Oneiric on my another computer (i3, 4GB RAM) and it's been great. For the alpha test I used an older machine (core 2 duo, 1GB RAM) and it's very sluggish. But it works okay, and Unity 3D is working on the X1300 ATI card.

So in summary, Oneiric Alpha 3 worked fine with Wubi. The more testing the better - so try it out, file some bugs, help make it better for everybody. If you have questions, post them at https://answers.launchpad.net/wubi/+addquestion

Wubi boot issues a thing of the past

With the release of the third update of Lucid Lynx (10.04.3) last week, this finally puts to bed the problems with Wubi and Grub2 (Ubuntu's bootloader) that resulted in many Wubi boot failures. The issue that allowed the user to overwrite the Windows bootloader is also taken care of.

These issues were fixed prior to the release of Natty Narwhal earlier this year, however, the patches to the active stable releases (Lucid and Maverick) were only released as an Update in June, and finally in 10.04.3 last week.

This was certainly a big problem that has plagued Wubi users for over a year; longer if you include the problem in 9.10 Karmic Koala. It kept many on ubuntuforums.org busy and led to the successful Wubi megathread (thanks to Rubi1200 for that).

I have been quite critical of Canonical and the developers on this blog for not addressing this sooner (this problem was probably the driving force behind the blog in the first place), however, I think it's true that my focus is quite narrow and the developers have many issues to deal with, and Wubi wasn't always on the top of that list.

It appears that now there is a strong development effort to improve Wubi for 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot - which I'll write about later. So far, I've been running a development Oneiric Ocelot Wubi install from early on in the development cycle without any issues.

One thing seems certain - Wubi is popular as ever with new users and a great tool to introduce Windows users to Ubuntu.

Natty is natty

In my previous post I mentioned that Natty is now working with Wubi (on the current daily-live image), and also that the new Unity desktop is now working on my old Dell with an ATI X1300 Radeon (whereas with 10.10 netbook edition and early Natty Alphas, Unity did not work at all).

Since then I've reinstalled a number of times and I'm coming to like Natty and Unity. It feels - well - "natty". Not that that's a word I'd use frequently and I consider it only marginally better than the upcoming Oneiric Ocelot (that must be some good weed over at Canonical).

The only Wubi issues I've found are a couple of boot problems with the latest version of Grub. The first was fixed very quickly, and the second only seems to affect my installs when they're not on the main Windows partition. I've worked around this by manually booting and then editing grub.cfg by hand.  I believe that it's basically the same grub rebooting issue from 10.04 and upgrades to 10.10, but this time there is no workaround - other than changing the  00_header script in /etc/grub.d/ but hopefully this will be resolved before release.

The more people that test and report bugs, the better. So if you decide to try Natty on Wubi, please report any bugs you find in launchpad.net and make it better for newcomers to Ubuntu.