Will Linux For Windows Change The World?

An anonymous reader writes "A month ago, a trial version of a little-known Linux application called 'CoLinux' was released that is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. It's the work of a 21-year-old Israeli computer science student and some Japanese open source programmers; in Israel, analysts are already saying it could help transform the software world." (CoLinux is short for Cooperative Linux; we mentioned this project in January as well.)

Comments

Good idea

[Joe U]

It's about time someone thought of doing this.

The NT(2000/XP) kernel has had the ability to run other native applications for a while.

It sounds like they are going the same way that Win16/WOW, OS/2 and Posix apps currently get run in Windows. There's no reason not to add Linux to this list.

Re:Good idea

[Halfbaked Plan]

The product now called 'Services for Unix' from Microsoft started out as a third party product called 'Interix' by Softway Systems. The earliest versions of it were called 'Open NT'.

Software became a licencee under NDA of Microsoft's NT code and developed Interix as an alternative and far more robust Posix subsystem.

One of the things that makes it radically different (and superior) to things like Cygwin is that Interix is a whole seperate subsystem that talks directly to the NT kernel, in parallel with the Win32 subsystem. Cygwin is a DLL kludge that rides on top of the Win32 subsystem. Everything is translated through an entire extra layer for Cygwin.

I licensed a copy of Interix before Microsoft acquired Softway Systems. My copy came as a nice bundle, with the Interix POSIX subsystem, Motif, the Motif libraries, and the Exceed X server. It included binaries for NT-x86 and NT-Alpha. It included a complete GNU toolchain, including the GNU C Compiler, etc.

The latest incarnation of Interix, since Microsoft bought Softway Systems, is somewhat 'dumbed down' from what it was in it's glory. With Interix installed on an NT4 system back in the day you could set it up with Inetd and make it a remotely accessable system that nobody even had to know was running on an NT box. Some of that is probably still possible, but Microsoft has pared away a lot of the useful binaries, i.e. it doesn't even have the vi editor anymore.

At a point shortly before Microsoft purchased Softway Systems, the Softway people put out 'feelers' to see if anybody in the OSS community was interested in Interix being 'open sourced'. Near as I can tell nobody at all responded. Microsoft bought it shortly after.

Re:Conquering Windows

[zulux]

Perhaps if DirectX actually was inferior, and if it wasn't the primary or only API for 90% of the games out there, you'd have a point.

DirectX is great for PC Games - but for real scientific/commercial work it *SUCKS*.

Whenn Boeing dows the next 7E7 fly-though in DirectX, give me a call.

Why a user might want to run coLinux...

[ghost1911]

I've seen a number of scattered reasons (above) for running coLinux but here is the scenario I have for using coLinux.

The need to run a linux Distribution from within a Windows box not the need to run Linux applications on a Windows box:

First I want to point out that cygwin will get you a secure shell, gcc, and a number of other biaries, as ported from Linux. But it will not natively behave the same way that Linux does. The primary difference I'm referring to is hardware support and native binary support. It is for this reason that Cygwin will never be as useful to the Linux world as other distributions are. (Contributions back to Linux from Cygwin are not practical.... [Mozilla aside, there are no other good examples of OSS projects where there is a large number of developers porting their software from a Cygwin environ back to Linux]). There are several interesting cases of Linux software being compiled for windows (Xine, Gaim, X, etc) but these programs are not sufficient to be considered a "linux distribution within windows" instead should be considered, Linux apps for windows.

Consider now, my personal usage example, I have had a Linux dist sitting idle on my drive because I sold my second box (power is expensive!), and I needed to develop in MFC (Direct X 9.0) for a course that I was taking (leave linux on one part, install XP on the other). Right now there are several applications and other things that I'm missing from when I had primarily booted Linux, but I can't move away from Windows and still continue my studies (and btw, dual-booting is not an option I'm eager to go back to [takes forever, and I always want that one windows or linux app when I'm in the wrong boot]). So, after this project matures, I will hopefully be able to mount my existing Linux partition, boot my kernel, and access my applications and settings as I left them before, without disturbing my continued study with MFC and Direct X.

A few final points:

1.) XP is not as unstable as everyone here seems to contend, I have had weeks of uptime on my computer at work, as has the other developer who works with me.

2.) Cygwin does not allow developers to comfortably develop Linux apps on windows, and is limited inherently by Windows (terminal width constrained to less than 72 characters, X Windows loads slowly, etc).

3.)There are a number of practical uses for virtual machines but the speed of these systems, their somewhat limited application (hardware) support, and the price of the software ($$$ you would pay a heck of a lot more for VMWare than for Windows XP, buddy) tends to leave something to be desired from that corner of the market.

In conclusion, yeah, coLinux may not change the world, and it may not even turn a few heads, but it certainly could be useful for a number of people such as myself who are looking to get a little bit more Linux out of their Windows boxes.