Running Linux Applications Under Windows

There wouldn’t be too many Linux users out there who haven’t thought about running a Windows application on the OS. Chances are many of them have done it as well, and why not? Wine is so sophisticated nowadays, that many Windows applications run without much of an issue. I personally use it for Steam, to play the odd simple game from time to time.

How about the other way around? A new entry in Wired’s How-To Wiki has a few great ideas on how to accomplish just that, and quite easily. The most interesting to me is a solution called ‘andLinux’, an Ubuntu-based distribution that runs in Windows. ‘In’ is bold because it literally does run in Windows, alongside Windows’ own kernel.

I haven’t tested it out myself, but I plan to as it’s a very interesting concept. It shows the ability to run many Linux applications from an icon in the systray, and they appear using Windows’ own theme. Other ideas on the wiki include Ubuntu’s Wubi and Cygwin. Well worth a look if you are just dying to have a kick-ass Linux application (like Amarok, featured below) in Windows.

AndLinux isn’t quite the same thing as WINE, since andLinux actually loads the full Linux kernel, but andLinux does make Linux apps look like they’re running natively on Windows. In other words, they behave somewhat like Windows apps running in the “Coherence Mode” of Parallels or “Unity mode” of VMWare on the Mac.