Saturday, July 5, 2008

Windows XP and Vista running on Ubuntu

Here is a new video that I uploaded to YouTube. It's my system running Windows XP and Vista at the same time, virtualized with VirtualBox on Ubuntu. The theme I am using is Ubuntu Satanic Edition (with a different background). You can also see the Desktop Cube that Compiz offers. :-)



Still not switched to Linux? ;-) You won't miss Windows this way...

PS: The FPS aren't that slow as they seem to be on the Video. Also, some horizontal red stripes that appear while rotating the cube are a glich in the capture and don't really exist.

2 comments:

  1. An anonymous user posted the following comment but I hesitate to publish it because he/she included his full email address and he would probably get lots of spam if a spambot saw it... :-) So here is the comment with the address half covered:

    Hi,
    Thanks for bringing such a cool discovery to the community. Really, you just pulled me out of my long and decidious hesitation in switching to Linux... I will give Ubuntu a try.

    However, I still hold a question for you: even with VirtualBox, can you run Windows-based software from Linux, without having to reboot the computer and start over on Windows?

    Thanks

    (hberaldi@...)

    ReplyDelete
  2. VirtualBox simulates a whole computer. That means that you can run Windows inside Linux without having to install Windows on a physical partition or having to reboot. This Windows installation can run any windows program like a normal installation would (well, applications and games that need 3D acceleration are an exception to this). So if I understand what you asked: yes you can run windows applications inside Linux without rebooting. They (the applications) can access the internet through NAT, they can also see your Linux filesystem with some tricks (Shared Folders). And you can even make Windows have the same Desktop with your Linux installation (directory-wise... ;-) ) if you want a perfect virtual machine. :-)

    But there is also another way of running Windows applications on Linux (including games) without having to simulate a whole computer: Wine.

    Windows application cannot run on Linux natively because, for example, when a Windows app wanna create a window on your screen it tries to use the windows API to do this. The windows API is normally provided by the DLLs in your windows|system|system32 folders. Of course in Linux these DLLs doesn't exist, so the application would simply fail to create a window without utilizing the Linux API which is provided by Xorg (if i am right). So Wine "simply" translates the calls to windows API to the corresponding calls to the Linux API, thus allowing most windows apps to run on Linux. This is a quite rough explanation but I hope you get the point.

    Good luck with Linux! :-)

    ReplyDelete

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