home ‣ Software worth using: andLinux login
Update on 02/17/2008: I stopped using andLinux. Turns out it was too unstable and haven't been updated in a long time.
I live in a multi-OS world and it’s nice to be able to do multi-platform work on just one physical computer. Since my main OS is Windows, when I need to do Linux work I resort to VMWare. While being great piece of software, it annoys me that the Linux world lives in its own sandbox. Sharing the filesystem doesn’t work very well (regardless of whether I use VMWare’s built-in folder sharing or use samba in either direction) and while I’m in VMware, Alt-tab no longer does the expected thing.
andLinux solves some of those problems and, as a bonus, is free. andLinux is an easy to install Ubuntu distribution based on coLinux.
While VMWare emulates the whole hardware, so that you can install any OS and it won’t see any difference, coLinux is a modified Linux kernel that runs as a process on Windows. Based on that it’s possible to build a whole Linux distributions and andLinux is a pre-packaged Ubuntu with Windows installer.
After installation you get ability to run a console inside Linux and the advantage over VMWare approach is that a console is just another application on Windows. Open five consoles - you just get 5 windows that behave like any other Windows application.
By also running an X-server on Windows side, it’s possible to launch graphical applications.
There are some downsides to coLinux, the biggest one being the fact that it’s slower than VMWare. Latest betas are supposedly faster than what andLinux uses currently, so there’s hope it’ll get better.
The Linux “hard-drive” is just a file on your Windows filesystem. The default size of that file is only 2GB so you’ll likely need to increase it quickly, which isn’t straightforward. The method I used involved expanding the file on Windows with dd command and then running a “resize ext filesystem” program on the Linux side. It’s not the safest way to do it, but it worked for me.
File sharing between Linux and Windows side can be done either by cofs driver which allows mounting any directory on Windows under /mnt, or samba.
On the whole andLinux is an attractive alternative to VMWare. I wouldn’t use for tasks that are heavy on CPU and disk-drive (e.g. compiling a large code base) since it can be twice as slow as VMWare on the same hardware, but when that is not a factor, a better integration with Windows is really helpful.