What has your recent Wubi experience been like?

[dtfinch]

With Wubi, I didn't have a problem so much as I had a fear of a problem.

People have said that if there is a crash or power loss, they're forced to boot into Windows because their ntfs partition is unclean, and then chkdsk runs and sees the file holding their installation as corrupt and deletes it. I haven't used Wubi long enough to find out how common that is.

[DogMatix]

The only problems I have with wubi is there is no hibernation. (Not cool if you crash out with your netbook still on) and if windows goes belly up it takes out your ubuntu too (although a sensible person would have good back-ups - wouldn't they? )

[Phrea]

I voted "I've used only Wubi for dual-boots - good experience".
Don't do dual-boot, and since I was going to convert this computer to Lucid anyways, I thought, why not try out that Wubi thingy for a few days.
Worked like a charm, I believe I used Lucid Beta2, but it could've been Beta1.

[Paqman]

Never seen the point of Wubi.

You're not the target audience. Partitioning is genuinely intimidating for people who've never done it before. Anything that can get people into a Linux environment easily is a good thing. First impressions count.

[thorbs]

I have just installed with wubi the last month. After wanting to try Ubuntu (and Linux) for a long time I finally did it.

As a concept I think it is good. It is less intimidating to enter the Linux world like this.

My experience have not been so good. I have had continuous problems with not being able to install programs. I have tried to install the e-editor, xmind, and xampp. All failed. Now it might be something I do wrong and nothing to do with the wubi. But still it has been giving me some problems and made me not feeling completely safe completely migrating to Ubuntu.

[detroit/zero]

I voted "other".

This computer is odd for some reason - I can't get any Linux LiveCD to run on the thing.

It has something to do with the NVidia card I have in, because if I unhook the monitor from the card and change the default video to the on board Intel in BIOS, I can run any livecd, and then go through a nightmarish process of hacking up NVidia drivers (along with blacklisting a number of kernel modules) to get them to work. I bought this computer in late 2005, and it's always been that way.

I don't feel I should have to do all that, so I've been running strictly Windows 7 for the last six months or so. I tried wubi the day Lucid came out, and I get some weird Python error as soon as I pop in a CD or a USB drive.

[jfloydb]

Wubi has always worked great for me. I hope Ubuntu always has a Wubi option. I wish other distros had Wubi options.

[phredbull]

People have said that if there is a crash or power loss, they're forced to boot into Windows because their ntfs partition is unclean, and then chkdsk runs and sees the file holding their installation as corrupt and deletes it.

I'm using a laptop with a sketchy battery, so I've experienced plenty of power losses, and I've never had that happen in the 3-4 months that I used Wubi.

The only problems I have with wubi is there is no hibernation. (Not cool if you crash out with your netbook still on)

Isn't laptop power management sketchy in all versions of Linux? I'm using kernel 2.6.34rc2, which is supposed to have improved, (though not completely functional) PM, and I find "suspend" works more reliably in XFCE than in Gnome, ("more reliably" meaning it succesfully wakes up about 60-70% of the time).

[tjeremiah]

Its been great. Ive been using it since 8.04. Then, it was terrible. Performance issues throughout 8.04-8.10. I heard that wubi may slow dow performance and I decided to do an actual install of Ubuntu and get rid of wubi. Months later I got tired of Ubuntu and decided to delete it, remove it from the bootup process leaving windows all by itself again. That was an adventure I wish to never travel again. In the long tedious process of removing Ubuntu, I almost damaged Windows.

Got that Ubuntu feeling back again and this time decided to try wubi once more. With 9.10 and now 10.04, the performance has been great. It even boots up in less than 15 seconds. Wubi would be the route I will continue to use if future installs of Ubuntu is needed.

[Water_Spirit]

bump