Wubi Install for Mac OS X

Question

I just installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my Windows 7 box using Wubi and I'm loving it so far. One feature that I love is the fact that because I used Wubi it doesn't seem to create a separate partition. Through what I can only imagine is some VM magic Windows and Ubuntu live together on the same hard drive without a partition and you can even access Windows files from within Ubuntu and visa versa. I also have a MacBook and I would love to be able to install Ubuntu on the MacBook as well but I don't want to surrender a portion of my disk space to a different operating system. Is there currently a way to do the whole Wubi VM "virtual partition" on a Mac?

Solution 1

This was originally planned as 'Mubi' , but I haven't seen any evidence it is being worked on.

If your Mac is reasonably fast you could try a virtualisation solution, for instance using VirtualBox - but this is unlikely to run as fast as with Wubi.

Solution 2

The development of a Mac Ubuntu installer is currently blocked by the lack of journalling write support in the HFS+ filesystem driver.

As Mubi obviously needs to write to the Mac filesystem, and most Macs come with HFS+ journalling turned on, this functionality needs to be present in the Linux kernel before development work on Mubi can begin in earnest.

Solution 3

You can always boot to a Live CD to try it out before investing time and effort with using Boot Camp Assistant. I've used it to install before and it worked just fine. Getting rid of the partitions wasn't fun. Luckily I had Time Machine so just erased all partitions and restored from Time Machine instead of finding a resolution :)

Solution 4

You can certainly run Ubuntu on the Virtualbox if you have it installed on Mac or Windows. you can allow sharing of files via "virtual networking" between the host and the VM.

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Comments

[Tachyons]

askubuntu.com/questions/89643/ubuntu-on-mac-for-dummies

[Adam]

Thanks! I did a quick look up of VirtualBox and based on the screenshots it looks like it's running OS X with a VM window displaying the other OS (i.e. Ubuntu). Is it safe to assume that this approach won't give up any partitioned HD space to the VM operating system? If I understand it right, if I'm running the VM from within OS X then I'm within the OS X partition so I wouldn't need an extra partition for Ubuntu, right? If that's the case then it's just a matter of speed.

[Code.Decode]

You are completely correct in saying you won't need an extra partition. Virtualbox will create a 'virtual hard disc' that it stores as a file within your current (mac) filesystem.

[Adam]

Do you know if you can boot to Ubuntu instead of running it from within Mac OS X to make it run faster?

[Code.Decode]

Not without partitioning I'm afraid (as far as I know)

[Adam]

Just installed it and it is running a little slow on my machine (2 GHz Dual Core). I think I'm going to end up partitioning to make it faster but I'm marking this as the correct answer since it provided a way to install Ubuntu on a Mac without surrendering HD space to a partition (which was in fact the question). Thanks! Until Mubi...

[Viraj Rao]

any timelines for its release.

[Tachyons]

code.launchpad.net/~step22/wubi/mubi