Request for technical details on wubi

[Evan Dandrea]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 5:47 PM, srihari na <namasrihari at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>           I am a student of engineering and i have been assigned a task of
> presenting a technical seminar on wubi.
> So can u please help me out with some helpful materials on wubi.I would be
> very thankful for your positive response.

The canonical Wubi internals document is the README file in Wubi trunk
(bzr branch lp:wubi wubi.trunk).  Quickly scanning that, the only step
that seemingly requires extra explanation is the preseed file
generation.  Ubiquity [1], the desktop CD installer, can be completely
automated using a file of question and answer key-value pairs,
otherwise known as preseeding.  Because of this we can keep most of
the heavy lifting code (partitioning, etc) inside the installer [2],
and keep Wubi as a simple tool that presents a familiar Windows UI for
the installation questions, generates a preseed file, installs
grub4dos and tells the Windows bootloader to chainload to it as an
option, and reboots into the install proper.

1: bzr branch lp:~ubuntu-installer/ubiquity/trunk ubiquity.trunk
2: bzr branch lp:~ubuntu-core-dev/partman-auto-loop/ubuntu
partman-auto-loop.ubuntu

Do note that Wubi has been completely rewritten in Python for the 9.04 cycle.