Anticipating Natty Alpha 2 with Wubi
So, its Alpha 2 week and what better time to check out Wubi again. But the news isnt good. In fact, things have gone from bad to worse. Before you could install Natty Wubi by replacing the buggy wubildr with a working Maverick copy to kick-start the installation. Now it just results in a loop in the installler (ubiquity) saying "No root filesystem has been defined".
So much for that... Lets try the upgrade option instead.
And the silver lining is... that the upgrade from Wubi Maverick to Natty was very smooth. No errors. No strange popups. No Afghanistan keyboard. In fact, the only thing I noticed was an "error: file not found" as grub booted into kernel 2.6.38-1.
So upgrading a Maverick install is still the preferred way to go if you want to test Natty on Wubi.
PS I didnt expect the fresh Natty Wubi install to work because the Natty wubi.exe hadnt been updated (since early December). And the new installer bug isnt too surprising either - its Alpha after all and you need to expect these things. However, I do think its fair to expect that sometime between December 2nd and February 2nd that the developer would have done one or two unit tests on Wubi.exe and discovered the problem (or at least noticed the bug report).
To be honest, Id prefer they stopped messing with Wubi Natty and fixed the far more important Lucid Grub issues... but I know thats not likely to happen.
Just today there was someone on Ubuntuforums.org who had their computer completely wiped (Factory restored) by some lousy tech support due to the Wubi grub rescue issue. These are real, live, normal people trying out Ubuntu and itd be nice if the devs took that a little more seriously.
