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Colinux and Cygwin

This is another killer combination :)

Ever since shifting to a new campus and giving up my old machine, I was
desperate to have a working linux on my machine. One attempt at
installing it ended up in the bootsector of the harddrive getting
corrupted and me losing valuable time which I had to make up by doing
overtime. Earlier I thought that it was Linux and Lilo that screwed up
the hard-drive, and I got a few ugly looks. But a few other machines
have also faced problems, so I'm out of the woods now.

Anyway, coming back to the point, I found something called coLinux on
our internal community portal. Its something like VMWare, but its open
source and works much better. So I installed and configured it. Then I
downloaded a debian root image (it needs a root image to work with and I
need debian) and presto, I have a working linux running parallel to my
windows.

The default boot gives a console prompt and it has a another windows
command prompt associated with it. I have a phobia of a cluttered
taskbar, and the lack of multiple desktops on windows make things really
difficult. So I discovered an option to run coLinux as a service, behind
the scenes.

By giving an option to coLinux, I registered it as a windows service and
I just have to enable it to have a working linux running parallel to
windows.

Since we have an internal debian mirror, I added the URLs to the
sources.lst file, installed ssh, blackbox and xdm and enabled xdmcp. And
now I just use xdmcp to connect to my coLinux running behind the scenes.
Its just awesome! Has to be seen to be believed. I'll put a screenshot
soon on my website and post a link it here.

Comments

The Shaolin said…
Cannot wait to see the snapshots ...
4:58 pm
Aradhita said…
Aditya from VIT?? (Linux, infy, football- now that combi should be u!) hehe :-)) What an accidental bumping into!
7:42 pm
Darth Chatri said…
Yeah, its me alright :)
Nice bumping into you. Keep writing.
6:42 pm
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