Distribution
Most of the changes in the Cooperative Linux patch are on the i386 tree—the only supported architecture for Cooperative at the time of this writing. The other changes are mostly additions of virtual drivers: cobd (block device), conet (network), and cocon (console). Most of the changes in the i386 tree involve the initialization and setup code. It is a goal of the Cooperative Linux kernel design to remain as close as possible to the standalone i386 kernel, so all changes are localized and minimized as much as possible.
The coLinux package installs a port of the Linux kernel and a virtual network device and can run simultaneously under a version of the Windows operating system such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP. It does not use a virtual machine such as VMware.
Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Gentoo are especially popular with the coLinux users.
Due to the rather unusual structure of the virtual hardware, installing Linux distributions under coLinux is generally difficult. Therefore users generally use either an existing Linux installation on a real partition or ready made filesystem image distributed by the project. The filesystem images are made by a variety of methods, including taking images of a normal Linux system, finding ways to make installers run with the strange hardware, building installs up using the package manager by hand or simply upgrading existing images using tools like yum and apt. An easier way to get an up-to-date filesystem image is to use QEMU to install Linux and "convert" the image by stripping off the first 63 512-byte blocks as described in the coLinux wiki.
Since coLinux does not have access to native graphics hardware, X Window or X Servers will not run under coLinux directly, but one can install an X Server under Windows, such as Cygwin/X or Xming and use KDE or GNOME and almost any other Linux application and distribution. All of these issues are fixed by using coLinux based distributions such as andLinux, based on Ubuntu, or TopologiLinux, based on Slackware.
Read more about this topic: Cooperative Linux
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