andLinux: Seamlessly Run Linux Applications on Windows

Michael Reed — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

andLinux is a Linux distro with a difference. It’s based on a port of the the Linux kernel to Windows coupled with an X server and other software. In short, it allows you to run Linux software seamlessly on the Windows desktop without recompiling it or using a virtual machine.

For this overview, I choose the minimal/Xfce edition which comes in the form of a 200MB Windows .exe file. The kernel used is from the coLinux project. Apart from that, the bulk of the rest of the system consists of Ubuntu 9.04 coupled with the Xming X server and the PulseAudio audio system. File access is split into three parts: the root partition is stored in a .vdi file and files on the Windows partition can be accessed via either the coLinux filesystem or the Samba file sharing system. Make sure that filesharing is enabled on the Windows machine if you want to use it, by default, it isn't. The installation contains a quite a few options, but I found that I was able to accept all of the defaults.

Installation complete, I was keen to start experiment with this strange system.

During the setup, I had chosen to launch Linux applications by using the small icon in the control panel area of the Windows task bar. By default, this contains icons to launch only the file manager (Thunar), the PulseAudio sound mixer, a terminal, a text editor and the Synaptic package manager. These applications load up remarkable quickly, and their execution speed is excellent. It should be, as they are not running through any layer of emulation or virtualization; they are running natively on the Windows desktop thanks to the X server and the Linux kernel.

It's a weird feeling, using Synaptic on the Windows XP desktop. It ran very well.

It was a slightly surreal experience to watch package management front end Synaptic popping onto the Windows desktop. In operation it worked just like it would on any other Linux distribution. One problem that you’ll run into here is that, as this version of andLinux is based on Ubuntu 9.04, the old Canonical repository is no longer active. However, this problem can be overcome, to an extent, by altering /etc/apt/sources.list to point it to the old release repository [see this forum post]. A full update using the latest package versions in that repository worked as expected.

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andLinux: Seamlessly Run Linux Applications on Windows