andLinux: A Parallel Workstation

There are lots of solutions that enable you to work seamlessly on Windows and Linux both on the same machine. But with andLinux, things have gone a step forward

Saturday, April 05, 2008

andLinux is a Ubuntu Linux-based system designed for developing applications which can run seamlessly on Windows. It uses colinux as its core, xming as the Xserver and pulseaudio as the sound server. With andLinux one doesn't have to boot the Linux system for running Linux apps as is the case with virtual box. Once you've installed andLinux on your Windows machine, it will run as a service on your system as soon as you boot your machine.

In this article we will guide you how to install it on your machine. The basic prereq -uisites are: Windows 2000 (or above OS), atleast 128 MB RAM and 4.5 GB of free HDD space. Make sure that during installation you use NTFS partition and not FAT32 as the files which are created during installation will be larger than 2 GB, which obviously can't be saved on a FAT32 partition. To begin installation, double-click on the andLinux exe file and follow these steps.

In the first step, select the destination location where you want to install andLinux and define the amount of RAM you want to allocate to it. We recommend 256 MB of RAM	You would then be asked if you want to enable sound for andLinux i.e. if you want to install pulseaudio, select 'yes'.

You can start andLinux either manually in a command prompt or run it as a NT service manually/automatically. For the sake of simplicity, choose the last option	For sharing Windows folder, you can either use COFS or SAMBA. Considering the fact that most people are not familiar with Samba, we used COFS

Now, you've to select the folder you want to mount via COFS. For this click on the Browse button and then select the folder	To create a shortcut for andLinux under the Start menu, click on the 'Browse' button, select the andLinux folder and then click on 'Ok'

The wizard will now ask if you want to create desktop icon for Colinux console and Quick Launch icon for Konsole, Konqueror etc. Check the appropriate check-boxes	Installation of andLinux will take approximately 5 to 10 minutes. After installation is complete, restart your system to notice the changes in the quick launch bar

After rebooting your system, you will notice changes in the quick launch bar(highlighted in the screenshot above) which now consists of Konqueror, Konsole, Home (KDE), etc.	One can find KDE start button on the right in the system tray, which will help you in launching different Linux applications you want to work with

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