From coLinux

Describe Android808 Here:

I've been using coLinux since 0.60, and have found it to be a superbly reliable piece of software. I appreciate all the hard work that the developers have put into making coLinux and hope they keep up the good work.

My Linux experience started, painfully, with Mandrake 9.2 installed along side Windows 98 (first edition!). I say "painfully" because I found out the make of my CD-ROM drive the hard way, by encountering the 9.2 errata about burning out LG CD-ROM drives. Luckily I had just installed a DVD/CD-RW Combi, so the installation went ahead. The reason for installing was because Windows had become very unstable, even after several clean installs. It would crash on start up with a blue line going across the top of the screen. Every possible hardware reason for this was denied by the fact Linux worked. Mandrake was OK, but I've always used Windows because of the monopoly it has, so I bought XP on OEM. On installing XP it kept complaining about disk errors, so I formated the drive, lost Linux, and it worked.

I have never tried to install Linux again because I like the way I have my hard drives set up, so hearing about coLinux in Linux Format, I installed it as quick as I could. Having had only a couple of months experience with Mandrake I wasn't quite sure how I was going to get on. I think Mandrake is the Linux equivalent to Windows in terms of its appearence. It is designed to be easy to use, but doesn't let you learn anything.

I liked the idea of Gentoo, so I downloaded the two images available. Both seemed to have problems when updating to Perl 5.8.4 when it got to the benchmarking tests. I switched to a development snapshot, the problem was fixed and off I raced again. I tried the two Debian images, but didn't like the distro. I tried Fedora Core 1, and found it to be a great, easy to manage distro. It seems a lot more polished than Mandrake, and the compiler tools work unlike the constant problems I have with Mandrake, even after trying Mandrake 10. I have since made images for FC2, FC Development and currently I have FC3 installed. I have always maintained my Gentoo images, having encountered problems due to running "testing packages", I built a fresh Gentoo 2004.2 image. This was ok still baselayout had to be upgraded, causing problems with the bootmisc service not starting. This meant previous sessions were not cleaned up. I tried 2004.3 on day of release, but the problem persisted. I have now partially solved it using a nice, dirty hack. Opening up the /etc/init.d/bootmisc script, it starts by declaring its dependencies, one of which is "clock". coLinux can't access hardware, so "clock" fails, resulting in "bootmisc" failing. So I just...deleted the dependency. It still spits out an error about the clock, but it cleans things up ok.

Since starting out with coLinux I have done a lot of investigation into making it usable for more than just console work. Graphical displays were already documented, so I set out to research sound, finding ways for it to work under coLinux using software currently available. I managed to set up XMMS using ESD, forwarding sound across the fake NIC to a Cygwin installation running ESD. Having this foundation I then managed to configure ARTS using ESD, and most recently GStreamer. I would like to investigate some kind of ALSA->ESD setup in the future to complete the sound compatibility. OSS is catered for by ALSA. My next issue will be the MIT-SHM extension under X.

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MassTranslated on 25 Dec 2004.

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MassTranslated on Sun Apr 23 17:35:30 UTC 2006