Subscribe to my feedcoLinux: home away from home
Those of you who know me personally will confirm that I'm a linux enthousiast. Until last year, I could even be called a zealot. Recently, I re-installed Windows XP in order to play a videogame, which still doesn't work in Wine. I also used the opportunity to check if all of my code worked on Windows, and gain some experience with the operating system.
After a few days however, I started missing my trusty old linux. I don't like the idea of dual-booting, because I don't want to split my hard disk in two, so I went searching for an alternative. I first tried running Damn Small Linux in an emulator, which ran very slowly and didn't really offer the flexibility you want from a linux system. After a few more attempts, I ran into coLinux.
Cooperative Linux maintains a special flavor of the linux kernel, allowing Linux to run alongside Windows, on top of the Windows kernel. This approach makes it a lot faster than emulators, and so far I haven't had any problems with stability or compatibility.
I had a bit of trouble with the filesystem images they offered on their site, so I decided to build my own, using Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy).
The only problem with coLinux is that it has no graphics support, but that is something you can easily fix. The easiest way to get around this is to install Xming - an X11 server for Windows. So now I can just run Linux applications as if they ran natively. In fact, I'm writing this from an instance of Firefox on my Ubuntu setup inside Windows.
All in all, coLinux is a great way for linux users to feel at home on Windows, and a great tool for Windows users that want to run a few linux applications without rebooting.