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Cooperative Linux 0.51Cooperative Linux 0.51Posted Jan 25, 2004 22:14 UTC (Sun) by donwaugaman (subscriber, #4214)In reply to: Cooperative Linux 0.51 by einstein Parent article: Cooperative Linux 0.51 As long as we're dreaming, I'd like a pony. Seriously, though, while I think everyone here would prefer to run the real OS natively and the poser OS for the legacy work, it's a pretty good guess that MS would work overtime to make their offering not work with any emulator out there that starts to help build market share for some other OS. (I'd guess that VMWare is pretty much under their radar screen, but that they likely have a contingency plan in case it takes off.) The real key to making something like this work would be a certain degree of transparency - allow users to put icons for Linux apps on the Windows desktop, allow X to display windows on the desktop directly, make drag-n-drop and cut-and-paste "just work", so that an office worker or home user might never notice that some of their apps are running on Linux (except for, e.g. invulnerability to a lot of viruses...) The trouble with such glue code, however, is that MS controls one side of the equation, and it's again a sure bet that the rules will change as soon as trouble threatens.
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Cooperative Linux 0.51 Posted Jan 25, 2004 22:50 UTC (Sun) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Absolutely. A Linux distribution for Windows could run the kernel and the X server in the background and provide a launcher for Windows that would run Linux software of the Linux kernel. This would eliminate the need to port userspace software to Windows. So instead of buying Photoshop or running unstable Win32 port of The GIMP, I could run the Linux binary of The GIMP directly on a Windows machine.Of course I don't want to discourage the ongoing efforts to bring free software to Windows, but having an additional option would be a nice thing to have.
Cooperative Linux 0.51 Posted Jan 26, 2004 20:20 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] From the announcement: "Cooperative Linux is like the kernel mode equivalent of User Mode Linux. It relies on the host OS kernel-space interfaces rather than relying on host OS user-space interfaces." Doesn't this pose a small GPL problem? Would linking the GPL kernel with the Windows kernel-space interfaces be a violation of the GPL? ... Just wondering.
Cooperative Linux 0.51 Posted Jan 26, 2004 22:05 UTC (Mon) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] No. GPL section 3 explicitly allows it. This is also dealt with in the FSF's GPL FAQ.
Cooperative Linux 0.51 Posted Jan 25, 2004 23:11 UTC (Sun) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link] However, MS can't change older software. If linux could run windows 98 smoothly now, then all those people who are thinking about upgrading could run linux and have a complete legacy system available. As more people find such software useful, more effort can be justified in cloning more recent MS operating systems (like samba does for remote filesystems).The other advantage is that it becomes easier to work out what magic is being performed in drivers and software that is difficult to support under wine. If you can run a mostly complete system except for one driver it becomes a lot easier to reverse engineer that driver (there may be laws in some countries that make this impractical).
Cooperative Linux 0.51 Posted Jan 26, 2004 2:02 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] As I understand it, Cooperative Linux doesn't include support to any hardware. I don't see how it could help with reverse engineering Windows drivers. Maybe I don't understand your idea.On the other hand, Cooperative Linux may be very useful for Wine development. You could run the same program in Wine and natively on the same system. The are other ways to do it, but having one more would not hurt.
Cooperative Linux 0.51 Posted Jan 29, 2004 19:28 UTC (Thu) by nowster (subscriber, #67) [Link] The trouble with such glue code, however, is that MS controls one side of the equation, and it's again a sure bet that the rules will change as soon as trouble threatens. We've been there before. It was called OS/2 (versions 2 and later).
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