Wubi

[Alan Pope]

Hi,

On 21 August 2015 at 14:01, Dimitri John Ledkov <xnox at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On 21 August 2015 at 13:53, Alan Pope <alan.pope at canonical.com> wrote:
>> On 21 August 2015 at 13:45, Michael Hall <mhall119 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>> Modern Windows releases broke Wubi, so we stopped shipping and
>>> supporting it a while back. As far as I know it's a dead-end now.
>>>
>>
>> We didn't stop shipping it. I just downloaded the 15.04 desktop iso.
>>
>
> but it's only used in greeter mode on windows which shows a GUI window
> and offers one to reboot.
>

That doesn't work.

I grabbed the latest supported release (amd64 desktop 15.04 iso) and
put it on a USB stick, shoved that in a Windows 10 machine. The efi
partition gets mounted by Windows, but it sees the rest of the stick
(containing wubi.exe crucially) as un-partitioned space.

So from my one-off test on a fairly standard Windows 10 install, wubi
can't work.

> launching wubi.exe off the cd doesn't start "wubi installer".
>

I assume you mean "usb stick" (or perhaps DVD) where you say "cd" as
the 15.04 image doesn't fit on a CD. I didn't test the DVD use case,
but certainly can once I dig a blank DVD out.

> if one moves the wubi.exe off the disk however, it still shows the
> "installer" mode if one wants to brick their windows....
>

I don't believe we should be in the business of shipping known
brick-making software.

We should fix these issues or drop them. We have no resources to
maintain this (as I understand it). I therefore recommend we remove
wubi from the CD image completely. If someone in the community wants
to take over the project, and serve up the (fixed) wubi.exe from
somewhere for those users who need it, I think that's a better way
forward than us having a broken version on our ISO.

Cheers,
-- 
Alan Pope
Community Manager

Canonical - Product Strategy
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope at canonical.com
http://ubuntu.com/