Wubi

» see wubi-installer.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Wubi answered one question that every engineering student with exactly one computer had around 2008. You wanted to run Linux. The machine you would have to run it on was also the machine your coursework lived on, and the ordinary route to a dual boot ran through a partition editor, which is the most frightening dialog box a twenty year old can be handed. Wubi made the question go away by not touching the partition table at all.

What it did instead was write a large file to the Windows filesystem at c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk, with a swap file beside it, and add an Ubuntu entry to the Windows boot menu. Linux saw the file as a hard disk and installed into it normally. This was not a virtual machine; the system booted on the real hardware at full speed. The part that sold it was the exit: if you decided against the whole thing, Ubuntu came off through Add or Remove Programs like any other application.

It started in 2007 as an unofficial project tracking Ubuntu 7.04. The code was merged into Ubuntu proper for 8.04 and went onto the Live CD, and from 24 April 2008 this was the official Windows-based way into the operating system. The installer was 4.7 MB and spoke more than fifty languages. For anyone who wanted a way back out, there was a separate tool that could lift a Wubi install off the file and onto a real partition once you were sure.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it saved you from ~

The 2000s dual boot was a genuinely dangerous procedure for an amateur. Shrinking an NTFS partition to make room meant moving data around on the only disk you owned, and a power cut or a misread dialog in the middle of that could take the lot. Plenty of people learned the word "backup" from the aftermath rather than the preparation.

I was a computer engineering student in Turkey with one Windows machine to my name in those years, and the calculation was the same for anyone in that position. Trying Linux had to cost less than the chance of losing the only disk you owned.

Against a partition editor, a single file with a progress bar was close to risk free. You could install it on a Tuesday evening and remove it on Thursday, once your wireless card turned out to be unsupported, without ever having opened a partition editor. The trade was performance and a slightly fragile boot path, which almost nobody noticed for the first four years.

~ windows 8 ~

Then the firmware changed underneath it. UEFI replaced the BIOS boot process that Wubi depended on and brought Secure Boot with it. Windows 8 then shipped with a fast startup that leaves the filesystem suspended rather than cleanly shut down, and a Linux install living inside that filesystem is in a bad position when the host decides it was never really switched off. Reports of instability and lost installs followed.

~ a quick and painless death ~

It was thrown off the default Ubuntu 13.04 disc image in April 2013, and a week or so later the download page itself grew a yellow banner telling Windows 8 and UEFI users not to use it. Canonical's Robert Bruce Park put the internal view on the record: Wubi "needs to die a quick and painless death so we can get on with providing positive experiences to new users of Ubuntu." That is an unusually direct thing to say about your own shipping product.

Installers kept appearing for releases up to 14.10 for anyone who went looking, and an independent fork called wubiuefi later rebuilt the idea for UEFI machines and newer Ubuntu versions, which is where the code lives now. The original domain now serves an Azerbaijani casino affiliate page. Someone bought the address once the project stopped needing it.

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