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xdentan
07-23-2004, 09:04 PM
Ok I have a few questions...

1. Can I run linux inside of windows with colinux? (I think I have seen this done before but maybe I am just imagining)

2. If I can not run linux inside of windows how can I get it installed on my hd (with the option of booting windows or linux, but having the posibillity to install new things on linux)?

Thanks.

baldyeti
07-24-2004, 11:23 AM
You should really give your posts a more descriptive title, you know.

Yes one can run linux from within windows using colinux. It can boot my HD-installed mepis which is quite impressive - and marginally useful. The environment is mostly server-like, text/console only, but it should be possible to run an X desktop (KDE or else) via an xwindows server (eg cygwin). Or even simpler, over vnc but I haven't bothered trying that.

The easier to get started is to download colinux with one of the pre-built images available from their site. There's a woody one, as well as a more recent and slightly bigger debian root-fs image. Once you've got networking bridging configured, and assuming you've got net access from windows, you can then add software via apt-get as usual. IMHO, this is not quite ready for newbies yet, documentation is definitely lacking when not downright confusing. Yet this _is_ exciting and very promising.

Actually if anyone has more experience with this I have questions myself:
- can one install the images on a NTFS partition (I've been using fat32 myself)
- has anyone succeeded in booting a live cdrom from co-linux

Durand Hicks
07-24-2004, 07:53 PM
Ok, I'm curious, is colinux the same or similar to cygwin? I had cygwin installed and ran a GNOME 2.4 desktop using sawfish from within windows. It was so slow, that i ended up removing it altogether and installed linux as a dual-boot option. If you had any experience with colinux and cygwin, which runs faster from within windows? And which would you prefer? Personally, I'd rather run windows from linux, but I'm having no luck with either the bochs or the qemu emulators to run the xp install so I can use it to troubleshoot my friends and families' computers online thru chat/terminal services. Right now, I've resorted to running tsclient to another computer in order to do this but this is not an ideal solution if i'm going to be on the road.

baldyeti
07-26-2004, 07:23 PM
Being an old unix-head, I am very thankful to Red Hat for their long lasting effort in making cygwin available. Their gnu utilities port, along with vim, are the first tools I tend to install on any windows system I am working on.

Technically, cygwin is an open source posix-like layer allowing most unixish software whose source is available to be ported to win32. Not really in a native way, obviously, since win32 is not posix compatible (and the POSIX layer built in NT is apparently all but broken and I _think_ has been dropped in XP).

Now colinux is a port of the linux kernel atop the win32 API. This makes it more akin to linux running under VMWare - even though the colinux guys argue that this approach is more efficient since it does not mean to implement a generic virtual machine but is optimised for linux.

As to your question which is faster, I have no idea at this point, and don't think speed is the only important criterion. For example with cygwin software you can conveniently access windows files, (although there are issues with unix VS windows file paths), whereas with colinux you'd have to share your windows files over the virtual, internal network in order to make them available to your linux instance. OTOH, I guess you might also expose your linux filesystems over samba, and access them from windows. Nice, but quite a convoluted setup I am afraid.

I've personally never even tried the cygwin X-windows server, nor the vnc way of displaying colinux GUI apps on a windows desktop. But I'd really like someone who has to share their impression.

Some might curse me for even mentioning an MS product, but I think their SFU (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/default.asp) (services for unix) are worth a good look too. It's now free, and provide a very neatly integrated unix-like environment under XP Pro. It even comes with an NFS client. I think they started with OpenBSD tools and ported that to their posix sublayer, presumably to avoid catching the GPL virus. One possibly irritating aspect is that as a consequence the command-line utilities are *not* the GNU ones, and hence accept different options and generally behave slightly differently. Hardly something new amongst unix variants.

From the little time I have spent toying with colinux, I'd see a use for developers who can be running say apache or postgresql under linux while using windows development tools. This looks quite doable, and internal networking has worked well for me, allowing me for example to run apt-get from the virtual linux. Colinux is also nice for answering knoppix.net questions and check your facts when under windows !-)

If the little development team does not run out of steam, or gets discouraged of porting their patches to one kernel release after another, then this might really become a fantastic trojan horse for linux under windows. Just have a look at their roadmap (http://colinux.org/?section=roadmap) for starters.


PS: it might be a good idea for a moderator to rename this thread to at least mention "colinux" in the title and make it easier for later retrieval...