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Public Discussions => General Discussion => Topic started by: miturbide on 2010.04.30, 16:06:04

Title: Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
Post by: miturbide on 2010.04.30, 16:06:04
I was checking the Ubuntu site to find more about the last version and I found Wubi, which is a very interesting approach for a Dual boot system, and possible some of the idea can be taken for us.

- It is a Windows installer
- It creates an input on Windows Boot Manager to boot Ubuntu from there
- Installs Ubunty Linux in the same Windows File System, so no partition resizing is required

Check out the Page
http://wubi-installer.org (http://wubi-installer.org)
and the FAQ
http://wubi-installer.org/faq.php (http://wubi-installer.org/faq.php)

It is quite interesting. I still need to try it out.

(http://wubi-installer.org/images/wubi-123.png)

(http://wubi-installer.org/images/boot-screen.jpg)
Title: Re: Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2010.04.30, 19:32:14
Works reasonably well. It is a bit slow because it installs it to a compressed disk image so your I/O is going to be affected negatively, but the ease of use and fact that you don't have to use GPARTED (which loves to overlap partition boundaries) makes it all the better.
Title: Re: Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
Post by: Radek on 2010.04.30, 19:45:08
It's a virtual machine in fact. Your HDs in Ubuntu are, in fact, winblows files on winblows HDs. Wubi = you are runing winblows, a virtual PC on it, and Ubuntu installed in that virtual PC. AFAIK, you can even quit to winblows.

You can achieve a similar effect even with the old VPC. VPC can run fullscreen. Wubi is slow with respect to Ubuntu - the reason is clear, winblows running in the background.

Wubi is not a dual boot and it's not a way for "full sized" operating systems. As far as virtual machines are concerned, perhaps, a regular virtual PC will be better because It is not restricted to a particular operating system.
Title: Re: Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2010.04.30, 19:57:22
Actually Radek, I'm pretty sure its not a virtual machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_%28Ubuntu_installer%29
Title: Re: Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
Post by: miturbide on 2010.04.30, 20:04:26
In the FAQ it says it is not a virtual machine. It boots from Windows Boot Manager, the only thing different than installing Ubunty directly, is that Ubuntu is installed on a image file inside the Windows FS.

For non-technical users is a good way to install Ubuntu since you can not mess up your partitions.

...but instead of comment it with Ubuntu, let's comment if the idea of making eCS running the same way makes sense.
Title: Re: Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2010.04.30, 20:06:16
I've used it previously (back in the 8.xx days), and I use a similar setup for xDSL on my first gen Xbox. It really isn't too much slower at all.
Title: Re: Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
Post by: Blonde Guy on 2010.05.01, 01:24:35
You could make this for OS/2 with a rewritten loader and OS2DASD.DMD and maybe a few other drivers. Maybe it should be a bounty?
Title: Re: Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2010.05.01, 03:33:37
Can  OS/2 boot from a compressed disk image? Perhaps we could have some more work done with DFSEE to allow this.

The DFSEE disk image files compress down brilliantly and would provide the needed engine to accomplish this task properly. Besides, a core version of DFSEE already ships with eCS 2.x for resizing volumes anyway, right?
Title: Re: Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
Post by: RobertM on 2010.05.01, 20:21:25
Those problems aside, I am also curious how these other factors would affect it:

(1) OS/2 doing anything on a disk partition over 512GB

(2) "Disk" usage in excess of the current container size (ie: OS/2's virtual partition needing to grow)

(3) Wouldn't this require a new, bootable file system driver that allowed booting off the compressed disk image - and then allowed reading and writing to it? Or is there a way to create a driver that sits between HPFS/JFS and the disk image file?

#2 isn't too much of a problem, just like in the VPC world... one would just run out of disk space until one ran the (in this case) Windows tool to increase the container image size.

Title: Re: Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
Post by: miturbide on 2010.05.06, 00:53:16
RobertM I can not answer you since I don't have the skills, but if eCS can boot from an USB flash and a CDROM, it may work booting inside a file image.