Run Linux as a Windows Screensaver

zornorph writes "A software engineer at IBM has come up with a way to 'construct and package a Linux® LiveCD so that it will install using the standard Microsoft® Windows® install process and will operate as a standard Windows screensaver.'"

Comments

Why not stand-alone?

[xorbe]

The article doesn't make it clear why it should run as a screensaver... is the ISO interactive? How does one escape the screensaver? Why not just run it stand-alone?

Also, this was surprising: "OS/2 is finally being withdrawn on December 23, 2005. According to the IBM Web site on OS/2 Warp migration (see Resources), there is no replacement product from IBM. IBM suggests that OS/2 customers consider Linux." They should at least recommend a specific product, else the remaining OS/2 userbase will entirely fragment. Recommendations are not irresponsible, only the customer blindly accepting it would be.

Following the instructions in the article is not for the faint of heart!

Re:Why not stand-alone?

[cHiphead]

This article seems a bit late and the screensaver angle makes it useless. I've been running colinux as a service on my windows 2000 box for almost a year. I can apt-get anything from a debian/compatible repository...

where's the news?

Cheers.

Re:Why not stand-alone?

[dryeo]

OS/2 supports lots of modern Hardware. Its true that your v3 and v4 won't install out of the box. V4.5+ will install on most hardware and with a fairly new kernel even the fastest P4s and 64 bit AMds (in 32 bit mode). Pretty well all display drivers are supported (by scitech), even under winos2, though only 2D. IBM paid for ALSA to be ported so pretty well all sound cards supported under Linux work under OS/2. USB support is pretty good as well.
Same with Printers, pretty well if they work with Linux they'll probably work on OS/2.
Basically if hardware works on Linux it'll run under OS/2.

Maybe there is a point...

[fmaxwell]

A distributed computing project (ala SETI) which relied on Linux could run this way.

Re:Awesome

[CastrTroy]

That's OK, just use the joystick to control Linux. For some reason windows doesn't think the joystick is primary input, so if you're using it for an extended period, then the screen saver turns on. This feature is great during games. Always seems to pop up at the most inopportune moments.

Re:Isn't this just the same thing...

[tyler_larson]

They're using Qemu.

Good idea, but I like coLinux better

[n2rjt]

According to the article, this runs Linux in emulation mode, which is slow. CoLinux runs Linux as a Windows application, which is faster. CoLinux, however, lacks a graphics interface. I use it with X, but that doesn't work out of the box with existing live CDs.

Running IBM 370 VM on an IBM 370 VM

[billstewart]

Back when I was in college, and we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to the punch-card computer center, my freshman roommate was a ham radio operator, and was friends with another ham, Phil Karn, KA9Q, who you might remember from TCP/IP on DOS and other projects. Phil had a job one year as a computer operator. The computer was a mainframe that lived out near the airport, and there were a bunch of punch-card/printer computer centers around campus that needed operators to feed them. The mainframe was an IBM 370 with VM and a variety of guest operating systems on top of it, including CMS and several batch systems. Phil guessed one day that the password for the backup administrator account (a 4-character uppercase password) might be BKUP, so he was able to access a copy of VM and run it on top of the main VM. The client OS on top of that ran v...e..rrrr..yyyy s...l...ooo...wwww...llll...y, and remember that that's a definition of "slowly" that considers punchcard access to a ~1 MIPS mainframe to be "not slow" :-)