Yes you read the headline correctly - andLinux is a distribution that runs under Windows and it allows you to run Linux software on the Windows desktop.

You may already know that Linux users can run Windows applications using a sub-system called Wine. This mostly works, but there are big problems keeping up with the proprietary code in Windows. You can't simply take the source code of Windows and arrange for it to run as an application under Linux. Of course, Linux being open source means you can do exactly that but the other way around.

andLinux is an Ubuntu system that uses coLinux as its kernel. coLinux is a port of the standard Linux kernel to Windows. This makes the claim that it runs almost all Linux applications without modification perfectly believable. It isn't a new project and it is still in beta, but it seems stable and usable.

At this point you might raise the objection that all this is unnecessary because you already have Linux running under Windows using a virtual machine. The point is that while a virtual machine provides a perfect solution in many situations, it doesn't run at the full machine speeds and it doesn't integrate with the Windows desktop. Of course the price that you have to pay for the andLinux approach is that you can't simply upgrade to the next version of Ubuntu.

Currently andLinux is only available in 32-bit form and the project seems to be having a hard time getting coLinux to work in 64-bit form.

More Information

Source:  OsNews
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