Windows-based Ubuntu Installer Development Thread (merged parts 1 and 2)

[thelinuxguy]

The kernel panic error probably means it can't find/mount the root filesystem. Is this is quiet or verbose mode? Try booting in verbose; you might get some more info.

I will do that once I get my machine back. My AMD 3600+ Dual Core based system just stopped responding for some reason and I had to fall back on my old Celeron 800. Quite some time before I can go into production again.

But are you sure this grldr.lst is set up correctly, as well as the menu.lst? Either could be wrong. Your boot.ini looks correct, though.

I installed instlux and grldr got me into the linux kernel alright. menu.lst was fine. I didn't touch grldr.lst and I don't remember having come across it.

I think your iso didn't work because I don't think GRLDR supports booting from a loopmounted ISO9660 filesystem.

I modified boot.ini to read c:\Ubuntu.iso="Ubuntu..." which means grldr was bypassed. NTLDR would have passed control to the boot sector on the ISO9660 filesystem and my machine can sure boot off it. But it didn't happen that way and the screen just went blank. grldr was not involved in this. I had done this to test the assumption that grldr 'is' a bootable image of some sort and can be replaced to boot something else. Seems logical but didn't work out as expected. Maybe I missed something somewhere.

And devfs is obsolete. We will need to follow up on udev it seems.
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/ke.../udev_vs_devfs
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/devfs-guide.xml

Regards.

[tuxcantfly]

Would somebody mind trying to install topologilinux and dumping an existing ubuntu install onto the root filesystem, replacing everything except /boot and disk-related files like /etc/fstab, and report if it works? If it does, all we'll need to do is tinker a bit with the kernel, but if it doesn't, we'll need to do a bit more work. Sorry, can't do it myself; windows partition doesn't have enough free space.

[tuxcantfly]

I installed instlux and grldr got me into the linux kernel alright. menu.lst was fine. I didn't touch grldr.lst and I don't remember having come across it.

You're using instlinux, I see. Does instlinux install under a loopmounted filesystem? And what are the differences between the core instlinux and standard ubuntu installs (like are any additional kernel modules loaded or anything)? Again, can't see myself; windows partition doesn't have enough space.

[amano]

My suggestion: NO, because there are much more important things to be done. Can someone on Canonical's payroll PLEASE fix the FileRoller bug, that prevents files to be extracted by drag and drop instead (just as an example). If everything else works fine, this could be reconsidered IMHO.

[tuxcantfly]

I just tried using ntfs-3g, and it seems like it has very good performance, likely better than a loopmounted filesystem would have. See http://www.ntfs-3g.org/performance.html for a benchmark. Also, it would likely be easier to implement, as we'd be using ntfs as just another standard filesystem (just add fuse to /etc/modules, and change the filesystem type to ntfs-3g under /etc/fstab), instead of tinkering with loopmounting, and standard grub supports booting off of ntfs. Also, windows can write to ntfs, so that would mean we could directly modify the installation files using the installer, instead of having to try to write to a disk image. The only problem would be the filesystem permissions, but wouldn't it be possible to solve that problem using unionfs? As in, you fuse the ntfs filesystem with a filesystem image, so that the ntfs filesystem stores all the files and directories, but the loopmounted filesystem image only stores permissions and everything else ntfs-3g can't handle. This way, you get the improved performance of ntfs-3g, and the advantages of writing directly to ntfs, but you still get filesystem permissions. In fact, if we use the FUSE-based version of unionfs, funionfs http://funionfs.apiou.org/?lng=en we won't even need to modify the kernel at all; fuse is built into ubuntu's kernel. So, would it be a better idea to use ntfs-3g, and would it (funionfs + ntfs-3g + small loopmounted filesystem) be possible, and technologically feasible, to do?

[tuxcantfly]

My suggestion: NO, because there are much more important things to be done. Can someone on Canonical's payroll PLEASE fix the FileRoller bug, that prevents files to be extracted by drag and drop instead (just as an example). If everything else works fine, this could be reconsidered IMHO.

Who ever said anything about Canonical doing this? Notice choice 2: "unofficial third party project"? Also, the FileRoller bug probably doesn't have anything to do with ubuntu; that's up to Gnome to fix, or if it was an issue with the packaging, whoever the packager was. Remeber; ubuntu is a distribution; what we do is package the works of the open-source community (Gnome, Linux) and make them nicely available and installable. We've got plenty of people doing packaging; it's around time we started making a more user-friendly installer. Besides, fixing bugs is an ongoing task, while once this is done properly, we'll never have to do it again.

[Nonno Bassotto]

My suggestion: NO, because there are much more important things to be done. Can someone on Canonical's payroll PLEASE fix the FileRoller bug, that prevents files to be extracted by drag and drop instead (just as an example).

Quite off-topic, but try dragging and dropping the files two times. The second time it works (at least for me).

[Nonno Bassotto]

Would this cause any performance issue? In that case it could give a bad impression to new ubuntu users.

[tuxcantfly]

Would this cause any performance issue? In that case it could give a bad impression to new ubuntu users.

When I used topologilinux, I had no noticeable performance issues, and that's with a loopmounted filesystem. ntfs-3g would likely give even better performance; as shown in http://www.ntfs-3g.org/performance.html it's almost as fast as ext3, and even outperforms it sometimes. As for the first impression, this is probably going to be much better than a live cd, because it's going to be way faster, almost as fast as an install with a dedicated partition, and will also preserve changes made.

[Hello1024]

Hi,

I'm new to the ubuntu community, and have signed up to try to contribute to this project.

I'm just wondering, is anyone actively implementing this yet? How far into the development cycle have we got?

If there is nobody actively developing it, I'd like to have a go at making the windows downloader and installer, as a kind of proof of concept design, but then maybe to be integrated into ubuntu later if it works well.

I'm mainly a windows developer, rather than a linux one, although I do have a little knowledge of linux, so thats why I want to work on this sub-project.

Although there are lots of views in this forum, I would say it's probably best to download onto the NTFS partition an image of a pre-installed ubuntu system, as that saves either trying to port all of the installation system to windows, or having a double-reboot system.

As far as the bootloader goes, it's best to keep the windows one and add an ubuntu menu option to it, because that way any faliure during installation won't break windows, and also a "repair" install of windows won't break ubuntu. That will also be compatible with any other OS's that may already be installed on the system, such as windows me, windows 98, and windows 95. It also saves having two bootloaders, because windows xp doesn't run without it's own bootloader somewhere in the boot chain.

As far as running linux direct from ntfs goes, I'd ignore the idea until they have implemented all the features of ext3, to maintain compatibility with everything else.

Taking hardware setup from the current windows install I would say isn't a good idea, because so many windows systems have serious hardware issues, as well as the fact that there are various "virtual devices" in windows, that aren't required in ubuntu. It might be a good idea to simply collect a list of pnp-id's of the hardware in the computer, and check it against an online compatibility list, to warn about possible hardware compatibility issues before the download - consider this a seperate side project though.

There will have to be some ubuntu setup script on the first boot to take the settings from the config.txt file and put them into the preinstalled system, and do hardware detection and install drivers etc., although I wouldn't really know where to start with that.

Let me know what everyone thinks of my comments above!

Thanks