I’ve been running andLinux in Windows for a few days now and am quite impressed with it an an alternative to VMWare for running Linux in Windows. It deeply integrates the user experience of the two OSs in a way similar to what Parallels does on the mac.

It’s quite small, a 150MB gets you a basic install including support for X Windows apps, with no need to also download a VM.

Rather than running in a virtual machine, andLinux runs as a user-mode process in Windows, using Window’s own drivers to interface with the hardware. This approach makes certain kinds of deep integration between the OS’s much easier to accomplish than the VM approach.

For example, I can double click on a postscript file in Windows and have it open up using Ghostscript running in Linux. Rather than a separate desktop manager, Linux windows open up as peers to Windows windows. Naturally, cut and paste works seamlessly across Windows and Linux apps.

This approach for cooperatively running side-by-side OSs was introduced in user mode linux, although andLinux uses a similar project called coLinux.

Performance seemed acceptable to me, though I would imagine that the true VM approach gives better performance.

andLinux is Ubuntu derived, so many of my favorite packages are easily available through apt-get.  (In just a few minutes, I added on mysql, Ruby, and Rails, for example.