Cooperative Linux is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. More generally, Cooperative Linux (short-named coLinux) is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine.
Introduction to coLinux
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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35 Comments
2004-02-02 7:21 am
2004-02-02 10:35 am
2004-02-02 9:24 pm
2004-02-03 12:25 am
2004-02-03 1:54 am
Anonymous
later when ReactOS becomes mature, people make something like coWindows (there must be an issue on the name tho it is just an example) which use ReactOS kernel as a kernel module or driver to run Windows on other OSes(mainly *NIXes), similar to colinux does (just the other way around).
I dunno if it is possible, but to me it is quite interesting to imagine. no more hassle on treaking wine configurations and no more VMWare issues like gfx, speed and compatibiliy(exists nativily only for Linux and Windows)
Don’t blame about my lack of knowledge on this virtualising stuff. I am not a programmer. 
2004-02-03 7:48 pm
From what I can see it looks impressive. Small memory footprint and able to run at almost native speed. I think I’ll play around with it tonight
It’s interesting that they are doing a ReactOS port as well. That would mean that ReactOS could run linux programs givng it a good software base before it completes its NT compatibilitiy. And once NT Compatability is achieved it makes ReactOS a good platform for a slow migration from Windows to linux (as it would run both Windows and Linux programs)
What I would like to see is an OS X port. Although most linux applications are easily ported to Mac OS X anyway so it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort. Bt it still would be cool to run linux and OS X binaries side by side (even though they would have to be linux PPC binaries)
A ReactOS port may be interesting, but certainly not for a slow migration from Windows to Linux. It would be absolutely useless, since coLinux already allows to run both Linux and Windows programs.
This would make it possible for companies and normal desktop users to get used to linux apps like the gimp, gnucash etc (ok gimp has a win32port but not all linux apps have)
Bt it still would be cool to run linux and OS X binaries side by side (even though they would have to be linux PPC binaries)
Google for “mac on linux” or “mol”
I think you’ll find something very similar to what you want, only in reverse. It runs OS X on top of Linux.
Disclaimer: I only have x86en here so I’ve never tried it, but I hear it works pretty good.
i allready have cygwin (with gnome and kde )and microsoft unix tools installed in preparation to make the full time switch over to linux but my question is how do i install this stuff ive downloaded the files and looked at the readme files but no instructions any help appreciated…
Mac on Linux (www.maconlinux.org) is just a virtual machine (not an emulator) which you can use to run a 2nd Linux, a BSD or MacOS, yet it requires an underlying PPC architecture.
There is no simple x86 equivalent because the x86 arch is rather messy and hard to virtualise, hence such “big” projects like VMware (and Xen?) etc. or “direct” ports like colinux here.
This looks cool and it seems I could give Linux a try but I don’t know how to get this to work. I looked on thier webpage but it is lacking documentation. Can anyone tell me how I could install this?
CoLinux looked like CYGWIN, or were those screenshots just using X server from CYGWIN only.
Er, actually, it DOES work.
It runs ix86-compiled Linux binaries *out of the box*. The only hard part is giving it a filesystem, which is supplied as an image file. You can download a tarball of a Debian installation which decompresses to 1Gb.
I just tried this out, using a custom filesystem image (128Mb) containing busybox compiled on a PC running Linux proper, and it worked fine – booted into the shell and everything worked as you’d expect.
The screenshots showing X11 were using just the X server from cygwin – as CoLinux doesn’t have a normal console that can host a traditional X server. No big deal – X was designed to network, and CoLinux includes a Win32 Ethertap driver for precisely this reason.
The cool part about CoLinux is that it could potentially be turned into a system service rather than an end-user application – so it’s just “always there”, and you can bring up a shell capable of running Linux binaries any time you like. If your XP or 2000 machine is an Active Directory domain member, then you’ll already have a Kerberos ticket which you could use for authentication with the services running under CoLinux. Something along the lines of UML’s “hostfs” would complete the set, and would make it potentially as ubiquitous as SFU or cygwin, but with the massive bonus of being able to run Linux binaries.
CoLinux looked like CYGWIN, or were those screenshots just using X server from CYGWIN only.
I rekon it doesn’t have some sort of a graphic interface like VESA at least at the moment. From the site you can read that they have implemented only a ‘partially working’ VGA console. It may can be further developed to support VESA-compatible graphics adapter I hope.
Well, I thought of that it may be possible to fork and make it to work on BeOS, I mean BeOS on Windows.. whatever.
What I forgot to mention is that X on the screenshot is CYGWIN that’s right but it used X forwarding to disply X client app of Colinux on CYGWIN X server of Windows host machine.
I followed the directions and when I run the daemon, I get this errror.. Any ideas what I am doing wrong here ?
C:coLinux>colinux-daemon.exe
Cooperative Linux daemon
Installing kernel driver
Error initializing kernel driver
Removing kernel driver
Stopping driver service
Removing driver service
Daemon failed: -1
C:coLinux>
C:coLinux>dir
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 40B1-EC25
Directory of C:coLinux
02/01/2004 12:03 AM <DIR> .
02/01/2004 12:03 AM <DIR> ..
01/31/2004 11:59 AM 523,746 colinux-console.exe
01/31/2004 11:59 AM 80,099 colinux-daemon.exe
01/30/2004 05:23 PM 971,618 cygwin1.dll
02/01/2004 12:04 AM 1,073,741,824 Debian-3.0r0.ext3.1gb
02/01/2004 12:03 AM 18,329,320 Debian-3.0r0.ext3.1gb.bz2
01/31/2004 12:19 PM 255 default.colinux.xml
01/31/2004 12:59 PM 41,280 linux.sys
01/31/2004 01:11 PM 2,874 README
01/31/2004 12:56 PM 2,925 README~
02/01/2004 12:01 AM <DIR> TAP-Win32
01/31/2004 11:59 AM 1,624,545 vmlinux
10 File(s) 1,095,318,486 bytes
3 Dir(s) 8,884,027,392 bytes free
Below is straight from mailing-list archive. One of the earlist ones..
“… binaries are composed of several parts in order to work:
1. A vmlinux file.
2. The Windows linux.sys driver.
3. A root file system
4. Two programs (colinux-daemon.exe and colinux-console.exe)
5. The Win32TAP driver from the OpenVPN project, which is currently
must be installed for the daemon to work. It provides the coLinux system with the virtual network link. …”
Check if you have already installed win32tab driver and rebooted before attempted try. and look fot linux.sys and vmlinux files. Actually I am not sure if it would help you get it running ’cause I haven’t tried yet and I am not gonna try out soon as I run FreeBSD at the moment and I will for a long long time.
Download and use the replacement daemon.
Seems like you could already use FireDaemon or SrvAny to turn it into a system service
Anyone figure out why the filesytem is mounted read only? Is that just the way it is for now? It actually shows (rw) for the mount point but you can’t create anything.
I’m a moron, it says right when it boots
I’m not seeing the point and value in this. I think this just gives a leg up for Windows. Customers/Clients/Employees will be less likely to switch to Linux if they can simply run it from Windows. Bottom line is that they are still under the licensing fiasco of MS.
Also, why wouldn’t you simply go with a LiveCD version of Linux if you want functionaliy of a Linux application? You won’t lose the speed. By showing the process window, this suggest that in the end, it’s still Windows running and managing that Linux kernel.
I’m not seeing the point and value in this. I think this just gives a leg up for Windows. Customers/Clients/Employees will be less likely to switch to Linux if they can simply run it from Windows. Bottom line is that they are still under the licensing fiasco of MS.
thats why its being ported to ReactOS…
Maybe we can have the best of both world with ReactOS and coLinux, at least someday
If you need to run some linux apps as fast as in native speed while running some DirectX or OpenGL based windows apps on a machine, this may be currently the only solution. You cannot run Direct-X or OpenGL based windows apps on VMWare with windows guest OS on Linux, and VMWare is slow. It seems Colinux is still not perfect and not stable tho in the near future I think it would be suitable enough for most people.
According to the web site, “In its current condition, it allows us to run the KNOPPIX Japanese Edition on Windows (see Screenshots).” Is this the only distribution that will work with coLinux? Would the English KNOPPIX edition work, or any other distribution for that matter?
Seems this is fairly useless for the majority of users until they get X running natively on it, perhaps the fd.o distro of X would be a better choice, for bloatware reasons.
I know that Cygwin works, but I thought the point of this was to remove the need for an emualtor like Cygwin…
Anybody know if LINE runs on ReactOS?
http://line.sourceforge.net/index.php
Sorry, I don’t want to have regular crashes ported to Linux
(Having just reinstalled the bloody system…)
cygwin isn’t an emulator. it’s ports of *nix applications. ‘port’ is not ’emulator’. it IS different. Did you mean ones like VMWare, VirtualPC and etc?
Buy Microsoft VirtualPC and boot Linux within a VM under Windows. Works great. Doesn’t suck.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/“