Yesterday morning, I left the laptop with about 5 hours to go to complete the Wubi installation. I didn’t count on my Father-in-law coming over three hours later, using the laptop, and closing it – thus hibernating it. He had no idea (uses my wife’s login) and I was beside myself after 20+ hours invested in it.
But amazingly, it must have found a burst of speed during that three hours, because it had completed up to the point that it required a reboot, which is an expected part of the Wubi installation. And, amazingly, it completed installing in short order after the reboot.
Now I have a working Ubuntu installation on my laptop. What I don’t have is wireless network access from it. I’ve looked into this, and it seems that there are some special hoops to jump through depending on your chipset. It would appear that you need to build a special driver for your flavor of wireless adapter. While this was less than seamless, I’d have to guess this is some of the fun you sign up for when you use Linux. I can live with that.
The difficult part is that it also appears that you need to get special firmware for the wireless adapter to work with Ubuntu. I haven’t yet been able to determine that this firmware will still work with Windows XP. Since the laptop is my wife’s primary machine, I’d rather not commit her to Ubuntu if I can avoid it yet. So until I can determine that 1) I don’t need the firmware update, or 2) it can coexist with Windows, I am reluctant to do it.
Another small challenge is to diagnose your problem at the same time as reading the docs on fixing it, when the machine in question has no internet access. It’s slower going than I’d like. But with four kids to pay attention to, carrying the laptop into the den with the desktop machine to work simultaneously. So here I sit: Ubuntu yes, network no.
Given this, and what appears to be “out of the box” support for a wired network connection, I’ve decided to continue the installation attempt on the desktop box while trying to figure out the wireless problem on the laptop.
Of course, it is currently estimating about 70 hours to completion at 2-3KB/second. I posted a question about this at the Ubuntu forums, but never got a response. Your mileage may vary, but at least that machine can be left alone to complete the installation no matter how long it takes. And the “pick up where you left off” feature that the installer has is a great help.
