Wubi on a Mactel?

[redfox]

Has anybody tried Wubi on a Mactel? This looks promising for a triple boot system. I'm wondering specifically if it will work with Boot Camp.

On a side note, what sort of release schedule does Wubi have? That'd be good info to have up on the main site. (Whoever wrote that site up did a very good job of presentation.)

[ago]

Has anybody tried Wubi on a Mactel? This looks promising for a triple boot system. I'm wondering specifically if it will work with Boot Camp.

On a side note, what sort of release schedule does Wubi have? That'd be good info to have up on the main site. (Whoever wrote that site up did a very good job of presentation.)

As mentioned on the website we try to follow ubuntu schedule. But for the "final" there will be some delay since myself and ecology will be a bit busy in the coming days and there are still a few changes I would like to see included.

As for the mac, lupin (the back-end) should already be able to support it, which means that if you manually copy ISO, kernel, lupin-initrd and set up menu.lst and preseed.cfg it should already work. The front-end should do that for you, but we did not have time so far to write the mac frontend, we will tackle that once the windows side is done. If anybody is interested in starting working on the mac frontend, that would be a welcome contribution.

[redfox]

So there is going to be a Mac frontend at some point? :) Man, that would be off the charts!

On a side note: what are the chances of Wubi working on Win ME?

[ago]

On a side note: what are the chances of Wubi working on Win ME?
Win ME? Unless there are some games/apps you cannot leave without, you are probably better off replacing it with ubuntu directly and use wine for the rest... Anyway, wubi might work already with winme, it's untested but it might work, try it out and let us know.

[Jeby]

As for the mac, lupin (the back-end) should already be able to support it, which means that if you manually copy ISO, kernel, lupin-initrd and set up menu.lst and preseed.cfg it should already work.

Hi! Can you explain how to do that? I really want to install Ubuntu Feisty on my iBook G4, but i don't want to modify partition etc. Is it possible? also without the frontend? I'm not a programmer, but tell me if i can help you in some way (beta testing etc..)

[ago]

Hi! Can you explain how to do that? I really want to install Ubuntu Feisty on my iBook G4, but i don't want to modify partition etc. Is it possible? also without the frontend? I'm not a programmer, but tell me if i can help you in some way (beta testing etc..)

Essentially the frontend does 5 things:

downloads the iso and puts it under C:\wubi\install
creates a preseed.cfg file and puts it under C:\wubi\install
gets initrd and kernel and puts them under C:\wubi\boot
modifies the bootloader so that it chainloads to grub which loads the kernel and initrd
it creates some virtual disks of appropriate size in C:\wubi\disks (which are simply empty files of appropriate size which can be generated with dd)

All of the above can be replicated manually. Once you reboot, the initrd (lupin) grabs the ISO, preseed.cfg, and the virtual drives and proceeds with the installation. In practice see the folders/files generated by wubi on windows and copy them over to a mac, than adjust the bootloader, and preseed.cfg (which contains your settings). You can skip the virtual disks and the iso and generate them on mac directly.

Lupin was written since day zero to be platform neutral, while the frontend is platform specific. I use lupin without frontend on Linux for testing purposes, all the time. In fact I hardly test on windows, since I do not have it... That said I do not have a mac so I cannot help you much. If you succeed (or not), let us know.