IT Professionals

coLinux Virtualization

Posted by on Jan 19, 2009 | One Comment

Gnomie Anthony writes:

I’m Anthony and I just dug up your YouTube channel (and I’m glad I did!). I’ve been watching many videos on Linux and virtualization and was wondering if you had ever heard of coLinux.

You only have the option of virtualizing Linux under Windows but I have found it to be reasonably fast on my system; coLinux does not currently have support for 3D Acceleration from the GFX card. The other drawback is that coLinux is a pain to get set up fully, however that may be because I set mine up using an existing Ubuntu Linux install while still keeping the ability to boot into Linux natively.

Alternatively you can use a preconfigured image from five different distros although some configuration is still required. Going even further you can use forked projects that aim to ease the installation and configuration of the coLinux box. These options come completely configured with audio and video. Using co-virtualization is probably not the most optimal option, but I did learn a lot about how Linux works — by the way, I do fail because it took me ten days to get it fully set up!

If you haven’t checked out this project then I highly recommend you do. coLinux is also still in development stages, so don’t expect amazing things just yet.

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  • David Baron

    Colinux was written by someone here in Israel long before the word “virtualization” became buzz. I do not know if a practical vmware yet existed. I never got to try it because I was using windows-98 which lacked asynchronous process communications that colinux required at the time.

    That you got this going on a real partition rather than an image is great, if risky. VMs often present “fake” hardware which can cause problems booting real installations, especially windows. I would love to run my windows-98 in this manner but the VM is just too slow hosting windows-98.

    You might try (if you will use a disk image) qemu which is opensource. Presents fake hardware but will run most anything. Microsoft has its own virtual-PC. If you want to shell out cash, vmware is industry standard and parallels is also decent.