Intention to drop Wubi from 13.04 release

[Dmitrijs Ledkovs]

On 8 April 2013 18:01, bcbc bcbc <openbcbc at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's hard to make an informed decision without knowing the usage stats of
> Wubi. If it's quite low then I expect there'd be little impact, but if it's
> popular then it's taking a low-risk installation method away from users who
> might otherwise not have tried Ubuntu. Does Canonical have any statistics on
> this?
>

The point that it's not low-risk any more. It can cause data-loss on
windows 8 side when it's hibernated.

W.r.t. statistics - we don't have them, as with all open-source
software it's free to distribute and we do not have any central point
to measure install base. And we will not be introducing one either, as
it is against our project. We can guesstimate, but it will be
guesstimates.

> Re. the bugs. I had a look at "Wubi fails to detect 12.04.2 and 13.04 AMD64
> ISO"  https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1134770 and found that the fix is
> a one-liner configuration file change (in data/isolist.ini).
>
> The fix for "13.04 installer doesn't create user account"
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1155704 could be to simply remove the
> disk-image installs from 13.04. This again is a two line removal from the
> same configuration file.
>
> I've patched and tested both 12.04.2 and 13.04 with these changes to confirm
> they work.
>
> Re. Windows 8: that may not be solvable right now, but I expect there are
> still many more BIOS-based computers out there than UEFI. And the regular
> dual boot for UEFI has many problems as well. Wubi could probably be smarter
> about checking whether Windows is booting through UEFI and exit gracefully
> prior to downloading the ISO/diskimage.
>

Window 8 + Wubi is dangerous regardless of BIOS/UEFI boot.

Regards,

Dmitrijs.