Hi. I'm Dan Aloni, original author of this project. It still warms my heart to see this pops in HN every few years. The others who have worked on it and myself are keeping that site as the good relic that it obviously should be :)
It still amazes me how breakthrough it was to have that working, given the lack of hardware virtualization for PCs in late 2003.
I remember using this decades ago. The user friendliness of Linux combined with the stability of windows. It did beat dual booting though. Worked like a charm.
I've been using this for years until early 2009, when I formatted my laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 and started running Windows in a VM. IE was still important back then and I needed to check web sites with it.
I was running Rails and other web frameworks inside colinux. I switched after I made sure that everything I was running in Windows for my work did run well in Linux. I remember that those very same programs run faster in Ubuntu than in Windows. The most notable improvement was GIMP's starting time: many times faster.
> Unlike in other Linux virtualization solutions such as User Mode, special driver software on the host operating system is used to execute the coLinux kernel in a privileged mode
That's unfortunate, is there a version of this that runs unprivileged like user mode Linux?
This was how I used Linux+Windows for years growing up with Windows 2000. Thanks very much to the authors, you helped a young nerd learn a lot and get a lot done.
What a cool and novel concept! Bummed and a little surprised it's the first time I've heard of it. I wish there were a browsable directory index of cool projects such as CoLinux.
Reading the description definitely set of bells in my head reminding me of the venerable Cygwin, though CoLinux could comparatively have potentially more capabilities and upsides since there is a fully resident kernel running.
CoLinux hasn't pushed a new release since 2011 and no commits since 2012. Was the project death a byproduct of WSL [1], or what happened?
A lot of the foss tasklist is just aimless combinatorials. And they become obsolete to boot:
-clone a program that just came out but make it open source
-port everything to every platform
-make x run on any dependency of category Y
And then it gets exponential as every new project becomes a new target to port from and to as a dependency: e.g, port linux co-op to rust, or port it to w11, or replace the backend with wsl or hyperV interchangeably...
This was an interesting project, I remember using it on a Windows machine and worked just fine. Unfortunately with added security on Windows it makes it harder to support such a project without help from Microsoft.
I wonder if something like this might make a comeback for workers that are blocked from using wsl/hyperv on their corporate laptops. For me I've been using msys2 as an "alternative" since I'm unable to use wsl. It's not the same but it's all I got.
coLinux was my go-to option back in the day, somewhere between my use of virtual machines. While not exactly the same, WSL eventually replaced it with a similar use case when I wanted to avoid VMs again.
I moved from Cygwin to this back in the day, and it was great. Of course, these were the times when Windows was still "NT" in flavor and the UX hadn't gone fully Vista...
I think it's great that tools like colinux exist but when if ever will IT departments (System Administrators) figure out how to support Linux Desktop users on our machines instead of forcing Windows or Mac on us. Mac is a terrible OS for Java software development.
Hi. I'm Dan Aloni, original author of this project. It still warms my heart to see this pops in HN every few years. The others who have worked on it and myself are keeping that site as the good relic that it obviously should be :)
It still amazes me how breakthrough it was to have that working, given the lack of hardware virtualization for PCs in late 2003.
I remember using this decades ago. The user friendliness of Linux combined with the stability of windows. It did beat dual booting though. Worked like a charm.
I've been using this for years until early 2009, when I formatted my laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 and started running Windows in a VM. IE was still important back then and I needed to check web sites with it.
I was running Rails and other web frameworks inside colinux. I switched after I made sure that everything I was running in Windows for my work did run well in Linux. I remember that those very same programs run faster in Ubuntu than in Windows. The most notable improvement was GIMP's starting time: many times faster.
This got stalled needing the 64 bit support to be completed.
It worked pretty decently at the time.
Last release is from April 9th, 2011: http://www.colinux.org/?section=status
It’s a pity that this project died. I used it and it was really awesome.
> Unlike in other Linux virtualization solutions such as User Mode, special driver software on the host operating system is used to execute the coLinux kernel in a privileged mode
That's unfortunate, is there a version of this that runs unprivileged like user mode Linux?
This was how I used Linux+Windows for years growing up with Windows 2000. Thanks very much to the authors, you helped a young nerd learn a lot and get a lot done.
What a cool and novel concept! Bummed and a little surprised it's the first time I've heard of it. I wish there were a browsable directory index of cool projects such as CoLinux.
Reading the description definitely set of bells in my head reminding me of the venerable Cygwin, though CoLinux could comparatively have potentially more capabilities and upsides since there is a fully resident kernel running.
CoLinux hasn't pushed a new release since 2011 and no commits since 2012. Was the project death a byproduct of WSL [1], or what happened?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux
I rand andlinux, a colinux based distro, on a work laptop for a while. Worked quite well and gave me linux in a windows-only environment.
https://andlinux.sourceforge.io/
Wsl2 is a pretty excellent modern alternative imo. I was even able to get nvcc/cuda working in wsl
This being historical pre-wsl aside:
A lot of the foss tasklist is just aimless combinatorials. And they become obsolete to boot:
-clone a program that just came out but make it open source -port everything to every platform -make x run on any dependency of category Y
And then it gets exponential as every new project becomes a new target to port from and to as a dependency: e.g, port linux co-op to rust, or port it to w11, or replace the backend with wsl or hyperV interchangeably...
This was an interesting project, I remember using it on a Windows machine and worked just fine. Unfortunately with added security on Windows it makes it harder to support such a project without help from Microsoft.
I used this back in the Vista times and it worked very well. Very similar to how people use WSL these days.
I wonder if something like this might make a comeback for workers that are blocked from using wsl/hyperv on their corporate laptops. For me I've been using msys2 as an "alternative" since I'm unable to use wsl. It's not the same but it's all I got.
This was one of the coolest things ever back in the day. It made Windows tolerable for me.
coLinux was my go-to option back in the day, somewhere between my use of virtual machines. While not exactly the same, WSL eventually replaced it with a similar use case when I wanted to avoid VMs again.
Reminds me of User Mode Linux, which AFAIK, runs only on Linux, maybe *nix.
I moved from Cygwin to this back in the day, and it was great. Of course, these were the times when Windows was still "NT" in flavor and the UX hadn't gone fully Vista...
Seems interesting but also dead for 10 years?
Man, I miss this so much, really wish they could have made the jump to 64-bit.
I think it's great that tools like colinux exist but when if ever will IT departments (System Administrators) figure out how to support Linux Desktop users on our machines instead of forcing Windows or Mac on us. Mac is a terrible OS for Java software development.
Latest news goes back to 2014…is this still maintained?
This seems outdated.
Wonder if this still works with x86 Windows 10
This is kind of reverse wine?