No more Netbook-edition on Natty Narwhall 11.04

Good news for Wubi users - Natty Narwhal 11.04 is out and it is probably the safest Wubi install for some time, mainly due to all the grub2 fixes that came out recently.

There's one gotcha that was missed during development and this is that Wubi, when run standalone, will still give you the choice between Ubuntu and Ubuntu-netbook. However if you choose Ubuntu-netbook you'll get an error message that it couldn't download the metalink.

What's the reason? The netbook-edition in Maverick was basically the same as 32-bit Ubuntu except it included the Unity interface. With 11.04 the newly rebuilt Unity interface is now standard on regular Ubuntu, so there's no need for a separate Netbook-edition.

Wubi Natty will be ready for Beta2

Wubi has seen some major focus from Canonical's developers (Colin Watson) in the past week or so, finding and fixing major bugs including long-standing Grub-related bugs affecting 10.04 Lucid Lynx and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat (these releases will see the fixes a little later). But for 11.04 Natty Narwhal, Wubi is looking stable now for Beta2 - or if you're using the current-daily CD images.

This means that both new 11.04 installs as well as upgrades from 10.10 to 11.04 are now working!

PS There's just one innocuous message you'll see before the grub menu is displayed, regarding the prefix not being set.

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.

Wubi finally working in Natty Narwhal

I've just tested the latest Wubi.exe available here. It took a while to download the latest daily-live Desktop CD image (in the end I did that myself from here). But after that installing Wubi was painless. Apart from a benign grub2 message, the Ubiquity installer was impressive - looking ready for release - and seemed faster than prior releases, as did booting up for the first time.

Surprisingly Unity even worked on my computer - I'm not totally sold on it and there were some rendering issues, but at least now I have the opportunity to review it, instead of staring at a blank screen.

So - in summary - the installation of Wubi Natty Narwhal worked flawlessly. As always, alpha testing has risks, so take necessary precautions.

Wubi pulled from Natty Alpha3

For those hoping to test Natty Narwhal 11.04 using Wubi, it will not be fixed in time for Alpha3 (the bug report is available here). The new target for a fix is Beta1.

If you read my previous posts, you will know that you could install Alpha1 with Wubi (with some workarounds), but with Alpha2 a new ubiquity bug prevented this from working. I haven't tested this lately, so I don't know whether ubiquity has been fixed. But it's safe to assume that the only option now for Wubi Natty testing is to install Maverick 10.10 and then upgrade.

It shouldn't really be a surprise. Wubi is intended for the newcomer to Ubuntu so having a working Wubi option early in development is not a top priority. Although I am puzzled what the major difficulty is. Also, the fact that there are so many major changes to grub and ubiquity between Maverick and Natty should be sobering for those that like to upgrade to each new release (these don't seem to be very stable products). When you also factor in the major changes to the front-end (Unity) and it seems to me that the Ubuntu developers are being stretched pretty thin. At the same time there've been some pretty major bugs in Lucid that have gone unpatched for over a year.

Wubi itself is due for an upgrade. With a 2007 version of grub4dos that hangs up on ext4 partitions, and some pretty bad usability bugs (e.g. the python code that chokes on multimedia card readers) and confusing (meaningless) error messages... someone needs to step up.

New release of Wubi migration script

I've released a new version of the Wubi migration script (wubi-move-2.0.sh). Here are some of the new features:

• You can migrate either Wubi or a normal install. It detects the type and handles accordingly. This is useful if you want to move your regular Ubuntu install, keep a working backup, or do some experimentation without jeopardizing anything. Also for Wubi users who migrate and then need to re-jig their partitions, it makes it easier to move the install (without worrying about UUID changes).
• It now supports grub-legacy. This was one area that was lacking - I don't know how many people have Wubi with grub-legacy, but there have been a few requests. So the migration supports releases with grub-legacy: 8.04 to 9.04 (as well as those that have been upgraded to 9.10 and later). The caveat is that the script replaces grub-legacy with Grub2 on the migrated install - so you probably don't want to be doing this prior to release 9.10 (I don't know how robust Grub2 is on 8.04.4, for example).
• It also supports migration from a root.disk file with the --root-disk= option. I had already come up with a manual solution for this before and it didn't seem too big a deal to add in to the script. So if you have a good root.disk, but you've lost the ability to boot into it, or you want to migrate to another machine, you can now boot a live CD and migrate from it. The root.disk must be a working, fully-contained Wubi install i.e. not have separate virtual disks for /boot, /usr or /home. (This rules out grub-legacy where /boot is always on the /host Windows partition.)
• Finally there are some minor tweaks. The new option --shared-swap will bypass the 'mkswap' command to preserve the UUID on the swap partition. Useful if you have multiple installs and you want to share the existing swap partition.
• I also split the output from --help into two separate options: --help and --notes to suppress the flood of output.
• Other notable changes - better validation, better error handling, for instance if there is an error in the chroot, the script attempts to cleanly unmount from the chroot before exiting. 

Testing all the possible scenarios and releases is a challenge. I've done a number of cases from releases 8.04.4 to 10.10 (except 8.10) including Wubi and non-Wubi, with Grub2 and Grub-legacy. But as always community feedback is always welcome.

Anticipating Natty Alpha 2 with Wubi

So, it's Alpha 2 week and what better time to check out Wubi again. But the news isn't good. In fact, things have gone from bad to worse. Before you could install Natty Wubi by replacing the buggy wubildr with a working Maverick copy to kick-start the installation. Now it just results in a loop in the installler (ubiquity) saying "No root filesystem has been defined".

So much for that... Let's try the upgrade option instead.

And the silver lining is... that the upgrade from Wubi Maverick to Natty was very smooth. No errors. No strange popups. No Afghanistan keyboard. In fact, the only thing I noticed was an "error: file not found" as grub booted into kernel 2.6.38-1.

So upgrading a Maverick install is still the preferred way to go if you want to test Natty on Wubi.

PS I didn't expect the fresh Natty Wubi install to work because the Natty wubi.exe hadn't been updated (since early December). And the new installer bug isn't too surprising either - it's Alpha after all and you need to expect these things. However, I do think it's fair to expect that sometime between December 2nd and February 2nd that the developer would have done one or two unit tests on Wubi.exe and discovered the problem  (or at least noticed the bug report).

To be honest, I'd prefer they stopped messing with Wubi Natty and fixed the far more important Lucid Grub issues... but I know that's not likely to happen.

Just today there was someone on Ubuntuforums.org who had their computer completely wiped (Factory restored) by some lousy 'tech support' due to the Wubi grub rescue issue. These are real, live, normal people trying out Ubuntu and it'd be nice if the devs took that a little more seriously.