whistler’s blog

If you have ever used Linux, the idea of running Linux and Windows together must have occurred to you at some point. The good news is that there are better methods to do this than simply configuring a boot loader like Grub or Lilo to be able to load only one of the operating systems at a time.

There is a great software called Wine which can help by implementing Windows API on Linux. It lets you run a lot of Windows applications on Linux but some of the applications require wasting time on configuration, some have minor display problems and other bugs. However most of the light-weight windows programs seem to run perfectly without any configuration.

Commercial software like VMware enable you to run multiple operating systems at the same time by creating virtual machines. You boot in to one operating system then use this software to install another OS in a virtual drive and boot the new OS on top of the running OS. This method gives usable environment but the speed of the system is slowed down to a great degree. Part of this software, the VMware player has now become free. I used this for some time to run the few windows programs that do not have a substitute in Linux.

Sadly the newer Linux kernels and distributions do not support my modem very well and there are other pieces of hardware which are really hard to configure in Linux such as my TV tuner card. Somehow Linux applications could not detect a DVD-R in my DVD-RW drive and thought it was a CD-R. All these things made me shift back to windows. But soon I realized that I was too dependent on Linux so I started running VMware on Windows. But the slow speed was not tolerable so I had to find another way.

CoLinux happened to be the way I was looking for. It runs Linux on top of Windows but not by emulating a complete machine like VMware does. It runs like a server in the background and you can connect to it using VNC or Xwindows client. VNC was not good enough for me but running Cygwin/X the speed of KDE seems just like when booting Linux the normal way. Although I have not tried this but you can also boot the same Linux installation from the bootloader as well as CoLinux. The sad part is that it is not easy to configure and the documentation is also not very good.

I am now running Debian and liked its idea of providing really stable applications. I do like new features in the software coming to me as soon as possible but then I can manually install these software whereas the core remains stable as possible.