This is very interesting Coldfire, I hadn’t heard of Winlinux before. Have you heard much about it’s performance? I read this review here which doesn’t seem super positive yet.
I’m not quite sure what the benefits are, it doesn’t look like you can run both concurrently which to me would be the main reason I’d try something like that. Am I wrong? Besides, if you are actually running linux within a windows window, it would seem you are sacrificing the stability of linux plus I would think it’d be rather slow having both windows and a linux window manager running at the same time.
Some of the benefits that it advertises:
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The ability to file share since they are both on the windows partition This is not really necessary because even though windows can’t usually access the linux partition on most distributions, linux has no problems accessing the windows partition. If you want data to be shared, you can just stick it in the windows partition.
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The ease of installing winlinux Many of the distributions out there are now pretty easy to install. SuSE linux has a graphical installer that is pretty much the same as windows (you just have to keep clicking next and yes with only a few pieces of extra information to enter). Also if you get a program like system commander, creating partitions without destroying current data is a snap (but make sure you read the documentation first!). That review above says that installing winlinux isn’t too easy either.
9on I didn’t really like mandrake 7.0, I couldn’t get a lot of my devices working. I have heard 7.2 is pretty good, but the computer wizards I work with don’t like it because it doesn’t have a lot of the development libraries they want. I do mostly fortran programming right now so that’s not important, but I will be writing more C++ in the future. Also, don’t put too much faith in WINE, there are some applications that will work, but many others that won’t especially those that use directX (which unfortunately is a lot of good games).
I will look into RedHat in the future, it’s so hard to resist the urge to improve your system!
The main reason I went to linux was that I was getting really tired of all the crashes because I typically run over 5 applications at a time on my 366 celeron thinkpad. It works great in linux and I haven’t had a crash since I started using it. I even tried to kill it once by running about 20 intensive applications at once and it was still fine albeit a bit slow. Incidently, my favourite window manager is blackbox a quick, bare-bones system.