andLinux is designed to make any sentence sound ungrammatical. It is also a linux distribution that runs under Windows 2000/XP/Vista. I was put onto it by long-time commenter spikeles and I am really impressed with it.
You install it on your Windows box and it creates a Windows service that is a linux kernel. It also includes enough X smarts to be able to run X applications alongside your windows apps. Here is the obligatory screenshot of IE7 peacefully coexisting with Krusader and Konsole on a Windows Vista desktop:
andLinux
Notice how the different 'linux' apps have their own windows taskbar entries. And you can NEVER have enough dual-pane file managers. And yes, konsole is about a billion times better than the windows command terminal. Oh, and note that the last quicklaunch bar entry is for Konsole and was created by the andLinux installer.
It's support for linux is about as deep as I can trawl, I was able to get autofs running exactly as I would under ubuntu. It is based on Kubuntu (most of the apps that come with it are KDE) and while the current install gives you a version of gutsy I was able to upgrade it to hardy from the standard ubuntu repositories.
I can cut and paste between linux and windows apps. The linux apps can access the windows files using Samba: there is an alternative method of accessing the windows files called cofs but the cofs website says:
Please note: The cofs device is new in coLinux 0.6.2. It's still in the experimental phase and is very buggy! So don't blame us if it breaks your disk ;)... YES it is, it crashed my server when I tried to rename a file from within coLinux This and other crashes are fixed in coLinux 0.6.3. Please see Cofs in 0.6.3 for a description how to use it there.
so sod that.
One bugbear at the moment is that with a dual-screen setup, andLinux seems to think there is just one big monitor and so windows pop up in the centre of the big screen, windows tend to be too large for one monitor etc. It is something I can live with.
andLinux makes cygwin look mighty primitive. There is always an element of finger crossing to using cygwin and I have struggled to get it working properly with NetBeans. andLinux makes running linux in a vm look like a cludge. If you want to use apps written by developers for developers rather than apps designed by marketing for management and you are compelled by your corporate overlords to do it on a windows box then this is what you want.
Thanks spike!
UPDATE: OMG Konsole is good.
Peter's Moblog
