Despite my recent love fest with Linux, I still find myself in Windows quite a bit. I have to use it for work. It is a lot easier to use for games (which I just started dabbling with again). I prefer to use it for blogging because BlogDesk does not work at all for me in Linux (but I’m still working on that).
What I would really like is some way to run both at the same time. I just added memory to the computer so I technically have enough RAM to support both OSes at the same time as long as something could keep track of which memory locations belonged to which OS. I have both OSes on different hard drives so there shouldn’t be any disk read/write problems.
I need some kind of software or program that is launched when the computer is started and whose only purpose in life is to launch the OSes and to keep track of how the resources like memory are being used.
Then each OS can have it’s only little desktop and I could do some Ctrl + Alt + Tab type of command to switch which OS is being displayed on the monitor.
Does anything like that exist yet? Or more importantly, does anything like that exist that people with normal wallets can acquire?
6 comments ↓
You might try running one (or both) inside a virtual machine (e.g. VMware or QEMU). VMware Server is free (as in beer), and QEMU is open source. The VM can’t read the hard drives directly though, so you’ll either need to create a network share for the files or copy them to a USB drive.
I’ve looked into them before and now that I have Linux up and running, plan on trying again.
But on Windows, I had no luck getting Linux running for more than a few minutes without crashing the night I played with VMware.
Use VirtualBox. Its a great little app. Free and I have used it running Microsoft Os’s within Linux as well as running Linux Os’s in Windows
Very good suggestions, but a solution that I’ve tried before is something called KVM, or Xen works too.
Get a Linux system up and running, barebones install with Xen, then you can install a Windows machine using Xen, and another Linux machine as well. They will boot up with the Xen kernel and you’ll have access to both.
You can even assign each VM it’s own hard disk.
I have set up what you are trying to achieve using M$ VMWare. It takes one hell of a computer with enough memory and processing power to pull off though.
The other alternative I believe Ryan is getting at is using a KVM Switch, we have a few of those on our test machines here at work. They simply provide an interface to use one Keyboard, Video Display and Mouse on two or physical machines, but not simultaneously. Since Linux doesn’t take much to run maybe you’d put it on a machine you can throw together from old parts or purchase online for $99 (TigerDirect.com) and use a KVM.
TL. Thanks for the tips.
I’m getting to the point where I just want to set up Windows to run at the same time as Linux just as an experiment. I never end up doing anything in Windows anymore (except for work related things that I do on my work laptop). My wife reboots into Windows about once a week to use one of her three must have Windows based programs. I’m going to show her F-Spot pretty soon and see if that will help her get rid of one of those 3 windows apps.
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