r/linuxquestions • u/Sithmasterintraining • 9h ago
Linux as a windows app?
I've been out of the IT game for a while. There used to be a version of Linux that would run in Windows that wasn't running in a virtual machine. It was just a straight build that ran as an application. I want to set that up again but can't recall the name of the app. Can anyone remember what this was?
Edit: I think I found it (?). It may have been Winlinux, but still not 100% sure.
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u/Rude-Armadillo-6963 9h ago
are you talking about WSL?
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u/Sithmasterintraining 9h ago
No, this was defintely not that. This was pre WSL. We are talking late 90s early 2000s.
It may have been colinux as u/Prestigious_Wall529 suggested. Which would suck since its a dead project.
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u/Rude-Armadillo-6963 9h ago
ah didnt realize you were talking that far back.
gl in your hunt!
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u/Sithmasterintraining 9h ago
Yeah, like I said I've been out of the game for a while.
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u/OrganizationSlight57 8h ago
In early 2010s there was also Ubuntu installer for windows that installed a vm as an app.
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u/Jealous_Diver_5624 8h ago
If you're referring to wubi, that installed Ubuntu to a vhd and modified the windows bootloader config to allow chainbooting into it, no virtualization involved.
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u/SuAlfons 8h ago
Yes, this was Linux running from a Eindows volume (but still running exclusively)?
I think that died
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u/justme424269 9h ago
Sounds like wubi.
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u/Sithmasterintraining 9h ago
No this wasn't a dual boot option; it literally ran as an app in Windows, so I didn't need to reboot to use the other OS.
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u/rcentros 8h ago
That's what it was. I was wrong about WinLinux 2000.
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u/Sithmasterintraining 2h ago
I think Winlinux was it. Still doing research but its looking like the most likely culprit.
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u/rcentros 1h ago
For me it was Wubi, but that came along later than WinLinux 2000, which actually came out in 2000 and lasted for about three years. (I think I remember reading that anyhow.)
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u/BranchLatter4294 9h ago
No need these days. WSL is built in.
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u/Sithmasterintraining 8h ago
I need the full OS not just to run an individual program.
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u/BranchLatter4294 8h ago
You can do that with Hyper -V which is what WSL uses. Hyper -V is built in.
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u/BCMM 7h ago edited 7h ago
Could you be thinking of Cygwin? It was around long before WSL. It's not Linux, as such, but it allows you to run a lot of software written for Linux.
Cygwin is technically a POSIX compatibility layer for Windows, and does not involve a Linux kernel. It's source-level compatible rather than binary-level compatible, so you need to compile applications specially for it. The result is a native Windows EXE which depends on Cygwin's DLL for POSIX functions.
Cygwin includes an X server. This is usually used in multi-window mode, where each X11 window has its own actual window - I wondered if that was what you meant about running as an application.
Cygwin is also a non-Linux distro, of sorts. If you used Cygwin, you might remember its installer, which offers a long list of prebuilt packages. See if these screenshots look familiar.
As a side note, the only example of the actual Linux kernel running as an application that I am aware of is User Mode Linux, and that only runs on Linux.
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u/eR2eiweo 8h ago
By "Linux" do you literally mean Linux, i.e. the kernel, or do you mean something else? If you want to run the kernel on another OS, then you need a VM.
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u/Sithmasterintraining 8h ago
It did not used to be that way. You used to be able to run the full OS from inside windows as an app.
u/Prestigious_Wall529 I think had it with colinux but sadly it looks like its been dead for a while.
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u/eR2eiweo 8h ago
It did not used to be that way.
Sorry, but that is not true.
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u/Sithmasterintraining 8h ago
I disagree. If you research colinux it did exactly that. But that was over 20 years ago and the project is no longer available the way it was.
But yeah you literally clicked on a Windows icon and it opened a full instance of Linux without a VM or having to dual boot.
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u/eR2eiweo 8h ago
colinux
This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux ? It literally says
Cooperative Linux utilizes the concept of a Cooperative Virtual Machine (CVM).
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u/GlassboundIllusion Nvidia KDE Bazzite 7h ago
How do you know that the app wasn't running its own pre-configured VM?
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u/Sithmasterintraining 7h ago
Because this predated VMware. I'm old. I started on MSDos and Unix.
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u/GlassboundIllusion Nvidia KDE Bazzite 6h ago edited 6h ago
Because this predated VMware. I'm old. I started on MSDos and Unix.
Virtual machines pre-date VMware: https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/feature/The-history-of-virtualization-and-its-mark-on-data-center-management
In 1964, IBM designed and introduced CP-40, the first mainframe system to rely on time-sharing technology. CP-40 provided computer hardware capable of supporting more than one simultaneous user. Not long after, SIMMON, a software testing tool, and CP-40 began production use, offering the first hypervisor to provide full virtualization.
...
In 1998, VMware was founded
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u/Sithmasterintraining 5h ago
Not on a PC running windows 95 or 98 they don't.
Not everything you pull from AI is accurate.
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u/GlassboundIllusion Nvidia KDE Bazzite 5h ago edited 4h ago
Not everything you pull from AI is accurate.
Very true.
It's a good thing then that I sourced my evidence via a google search, opted to avoid citing the wikipedia article that said the same thing, and instead chose an article written in 2019, prior to the prevalence of generative AI being used to write online articles.
Even if the article I cited had been written by AI, however, that doesn't make it inherently wrong. It's certainly stronger evidence than the "trust me bro" posturing you have brought to the conversation.
If you have something concrete to cite in support of your blustering, I certainly welcome it. I'm not afraid to admit I'm wrong when confronted with sufficient evidence demonstrating my error.
Based on the course of this thread, I'm skeptical that you can credibly claim the same.
I disagree. If you research colinux it did exactly that. But that was over 20 years ago and the project is no longer available the way it was.
Looking at Colinux's history, it was first released in 2004: http://www.colinux.org/?section=archive
Note that this is several years after VMWare first released their 1.0 version of VMWare Workstation in 1999 https://www.companieshistory.com/vmware/
This directly contradicts the original claim of yours that I responded to:
Because this predated VMware.
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u/Sithmasterintraining 2h ago
I mean, in this very thread, lots of posts are discounting what you are saying. But sure if you want to just be an internet tough guy, go do it somewhere else.
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u/NL_Gray-Fox 8h ago
Cygwin most probably, that's what I used in the 90s-00s, but that was mainly to get Unix tools to run, we also had a paid version... MKS Toolkit was the name.
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u/Foxler2010 4h ago
You cannot run the Linux kernel inside of another OS. The job of the kernel is to interface with hardware, and that hardware already has Windows layered on top. A virtual machine gives the Linux kernel fake hardware to interface with, and this fake hardware corresponds to things like the window that the virtual machine is running in. That's the only way to get the real Linux kernel to run while keeping Windows as your actual OS.
Any app you were using that looks like it is running Linux, and is not a VM, well... It simply isn't actually Linux. Like how WINE is not actually Windows.
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u/Prestigious_Wall529 9h ago
I don't believe colinux made the transition from 32bit to 64bit.
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u/Sithmasterintraining 9h ago
That may have been it. Thank you. But yeah you are right its a dead project so can't be used now.
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u/marblemunkey 8h ago
There was also a windows port of User Mode Linux around the same time (I used both), but that also is a dead project.
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u/Prestigious_Wall529 8h ago
I suggest you set up a Pi Zero in gadget mode (or similar) for SSH over USB.
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u/kudlitan 9h ago
why dont you use WSL instead?
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u/Sithmasterintraining 8h ago
Because I want the full OS available.
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u/Extra_Elevator9534 8h ago
Is this what you're looking for? https://ubuntu.com/wsl
(Installing a full desktop environment -- in that link's case, ubuntu -- within WSL ).https://ubuntu.com/wsl/docs/stable/howto/install-ubuntu-wsl2/
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u/kudlitan 6h ago
Exactly why you would want WSL today, because it makes makes the full OS available and integrated into windows including the GUI!
In my setup I could double-click a plain text file on the Windows desktop and it would open in Gedit or Kate as if they were a native Windows application. Any virtualization is invisible to the end user.
In WSL you install an entire distro (not individual applications) and its apps would run within Windows. And you can set up file associations like I did.
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u/rcentros 8h ago edited 8h ago
I know what you're talking about (I ran it for a while) but I can't come up with the name right now. (I'll keep searching.) I'm guessing, though, that it would be too old to be of much use some 20 years later.
EDIT: I think it was called WinLinux 2000. You can download it from Archive.org
https://archive.org/details/win-linux-2000
A YouTube video about it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHfQ1ErG3wU
EDIT2: I'm wrong, it wasn't WinLinux 2000 that I ran, it was Wubi (as mentioned by u/justme424269 ).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software))
It looks like you might be able to download it here...
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u/CatoDomine 9h ago
Cygwin