Portable Linux For Windows

As I have now linked my blog to my Facebook account, I'll start writing my posts in English. I'm going to refer to what can be considered an odd Linux distribution: a Linux that runs inside Microsoft Windows... who would have thought of that??? And what's the point?!?

I think it's really a useful distribution for the following motives:
- it's portable, meaning you can have it in your thumb drive and take your Linux OS wherever you want.
- it's useful when you're at work, locked out from a Linux PC due to bureaucracies.
- it's an excellent distribution for those guys that want to run some open source tools that are not available in Windows, and don't want to have to have to reboot and change to Linux just for that.
- it's an excellent way to introduce Linux to new users.

I'm a sucker for the music player Amarok. I was very happy when I found out that Amarok was being released for Windows... but the version I tried out was buggy (it's not oficially supported) and was lacking most of the features I wanted to use (I LOVE the play random and favor least heard feature). And, as you can see in the picture above, here I am running Linux's Amarok on my Vista laptop.

"Hey isn't it confusing?? Both systems working at the same time?" No, it's quite simple actually. The Ubuntu distribution being run does not have a Desktop, and can only be seen as a simple menu bar at the top of the screen, from where every application/configuration tool can be launched. Every resulting window is then opened in Windows using XMing.

"So what do you get?" A Ubuntu system inside your Windows. What do I have to pay? A performance hit, there is some overhead involved in the process. However, I must admit some surprise, it works faster than I expected when I was reading about it.

"OK... I've read this far, I'm interested in giving it a go... where do I get it and what do I need to know?"
1 - Check out Lifehacker's post about this. There's a small guide on how to run it from Vista/XP and a link to the site where you can download it from. LINK TO LIFEHACKER'S POST
2 - Credits to Mr. Rui Pires for this one -> LINK TO HIS BLOG. I was having problems adding new programs as downloads were failing too often. Rui remembered to check the server from which Ubuntu was trying to download stuff from. Turns out it was a not so good server. To change it, here is the How To sequence:
(1)System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager ->123456
(2)Settings -> Respositories -> DownloadFrom -> Other -> Select Best Server (will ping every server and pick the best one)
(3)Reload
And that's that, you are ready to start installing any program you want by clicking Applications -> Add/Remove programs
3 - This one is on me. You'll start with access to your typical C:\ hard drive. Good way to share your files between environments, not as good if your music collection is not stored there for example. I immediately navigate to /dev to mount my other partitions... no such luck... didn't find them anywhere. So I remembered reading about soft links in Windows environments in Lifehacker. So, once again, I dived in my archives, and here is the holy post: LINK. So, I created soft links to the folders I wanted to access in C:\, and can now access my music collection from Amarok running in Ubuntu over Windows :D (as you can see in the pic).

It has been a long post, if you read it this far then you are a geek... I'm not cof cof... and it's not denial... cof cof. Anyway, this little Linux adventure has shown me a couple of things: how really cool can Linux get, how nice it is to have Linux geek friends and how great a blog Lifehacker is for us geeks!