I’m a passionate Gentoo Linux user, but on my notebook I use primarily Windows XP. I always missed some applications, mostly GnuCash, which has not been ported to Windows right now.
Some time ago I came around andLinux, a virtual Linux for Windows. andLinux is based on coLinux and uses the Ubuntu package repository. It is currently in beta stage, because it is still missing an installer. The download is about 130MB and extracts around 2GB to the HDD. Main advantage of coLinux is (unlike VMWare) that memory for the started processes is only allocated as required, as it is not run in a virtual machine but every started process is a real process on the host system.
Most part of these 2GB are a virtual drive for coLinux. andLinux provides tools for resizing the disk if required. Network connectivity is provided by a virtual TAP network adapter.
After booting up for the first time, everything worked quite well. Only the file manager package was not installed. Booting took some time, because the filesystem (ext2) is set to be checked on every mount. Using tune2fs I deactivated these checks which speeds up booting considerably.
To get DNS resolving working, I had to change /etc/resolve.conf, but I’m not sure if it wasn’t maybe a local issue with the DNS server.
Installation of additional software went smoothly, using Synopsis package manager which is pre-installed and located in the xfce4 panel which is used as sole GUI element after booting. As Austrian-based user I changed the APT sources to point to local mirrors instead of the US mirrors. As mentioned before, the Ubuntu package repository is used. The current distribution uses a 2.6.17 kernel patched with the coLinux patches.
All worked quite smoothly and I easily got GnuCash installed and running. Interoperability with the host system was solved with a SMB share on the host, synchronizing required data with my “real” Linux box using unison to the host and using the data via the SMB share.
The only downside of the current implementation is that at the moment, the whole system is set up to run as root. I will change this as soon as I find some time.
I really like this project, as I now can use the best of both worlds, Windows and Linux. I can recommend it to everyone who is using Linux and has some boxes where he/she is running Windows but also wants to use Linux applications there.