Some Ubuntu devs have just noticed that Wubi is still here

Aug 23, 2015 16:09 GMT  ·  By

Wubi was a tool made by Canonical that acted as an Ubuntu installed for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, allowing users to install Ubuntu alongside those OSes. It's been deprecated for two years, but it somehow "mysteriously" survived on the installation media until now.

Wubi was a very good idea. Windows users could install Ubuntu without needing to have any idea about how a Linux system installer works. They didn't have to know to use a certain kind of file system or that they needed a Swap partition. They just started the app from any Windows OS (until 7), choose a few options, pop in the Ubuntu CD, and that was about it. Changes to the Windows 8 boot-loader made the application pretty much useless, so it was dropped.

The work that had to be done in order to make Wubi work with Windows 8 was not justified. There weren't too many Wubi users in the first place, so when Wubi was dropped, no one really missed it, and it soon faded away. The interesting thing is that Wubi can still be found on the Ubuntu images, and it's not working, as you might expect.

Wubi is self-aware

Either Wubi has become self-aware or the developers simply forgot to remove it from the installation media. Any way, it's confusing to find a tool that is no longer supported and that can even create problems for users with Windows installations.

Surprisingly, one of Canonical's people found out about this issue and asked around the mailing list to find out what was happening with Wubi.

"Is wubi still a supported way of installing? If so, who maintains it? Seems we have some bugs including one fairly serious one which causes the wrong version of Ubuntu to get installed. I was told wubi (installer) was to be replaced by a simpler wubi which is just a menu. This doesn't seem to have happened. If we don't plan on fixing these (new user) facing issues, is it time to retire wubi from the images?" wrote Alan Pope.

From the looks of it, Ubuntu 15.04 is the last ISO that comes with Wubi, but fortunately we'll get a better tool in the future.