RockDoggy’s Woodshop

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.

OK, I couldn’t let it go.

Back to the laptop, I decided to click on the Wubi installer again. One feature I didn’t mention is that it’s able to resume a cancelled installation. So it picked up again at about 24%. It’s also downloading at twice the speed it was this morning. Of course, zero times two is still zero, right? But I’m willing to let it roll again.

Out of curiosity, I did a broadband speed check (during the install) just to make sure it wasn’t my connection. While I certainly wasn’t getting my alleged 6 megabits, I was just short of 2 megabits during the install. Plenty of leftover bandwidth.

So I can only assume the problem is with Wubi’s sudden popularity, though their forums don’t reflect much of a problem. Not sure what to think of that. But I think I’ll let this go, and see where we get to in the morning. According to the installer’s most recent estimate, I have 14.5 hours to go.

Well that was unsatisfying.

I tried the download on my little-used desktop after clearing 12.5 GB of space on it, and the downloads were similarly snail-ish. I killed it. I’ll dig on the Wubi site later, perhaps. But for now I quit.

No Ubuntu for me today!

This update is short, since I abandoned the installation of Wubi.  I let it run overnight last night, going to be with an estimated 28 hours remaining.  When I woke up this morning, it was estimating 25 hours, and I guarantee I slept at least 7 hours.  So I quit the install.

I did check the Wubi forums and FAQ, hoping to find some guidance on this slowness, but other than finding one or two other souls with the same problem, I found no answers.  My guess is that something on the laptop (AVG anti-virus, or who knows what) is killing the download speed that other people report being close to 10 minutes.
I think I’ll try again on my desktop machine, and see if the results are better.  More to follow in part 3…

If you haven’t heard of Wubi, here’s a short explanation: Wubi is an Ubuntu Linux distribution that you install via a Windows installer package. Then you can boot into Ubuntu or Windows as you wish, or at least that’s my basic (and possibly flawed) understanding of what you get. I don’t think it’s a virtual machine implementation, but that’d be interesting to me too. So upon hearing about this somewhere online, I decided to give it a whirl.

The download of the Wubi installer was quick, too quick for a fully featured Ubuntu installation, I was sure. And I was correct. What you initially download is a package that then downloads components from the web as necessary, and installs them as it goes.

For the record, and the curious, I am installing this on a Dell Latitude D600 laptop currently running Microsoft Windows XP service pack 2, and fully patched (if you’re interested).

The first error came pretty quickly.

The first error I found during my Wubi installation

I pressed OK on this error, and the installation continued at a blistering pace of 6 KB/sec. That’s 6 KB, not 6 MB. Since this is a 694.5 MB download (at least the current part is), this is going to take a while. Over 33 hours according to the download dialog seen here.

Wubi download progress during installation

So here I sit at 2% and I’m nowhere near completion. I’ve decided to post this much, and come back later (tomorrow?) to post my progress, or lack thereof.

More to follow…