Lina Released

[dserban 0]

Lina Software released the source code for LINA under the GPL v2. LINA enables Linux binaries to run with native look and feel on Windows, Mac, and Linux, without recompiling. This release, along with the launch of the community website http://www.openlina.org/, invites developers around the world to participate in the growth of this important technology.
This is basically a reverse WINE. They should have called it ENIW.

http://openlina.org/news.html
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Edited June 3, 2008 by dserban (see edit history)

[ethergeek 0]

Other than linking to the uxtheme dll's, how is this any different or more useful than cygwin? I'm confused...

Edited September 21, 2007 by ethergeek (see edit history)

[dserban 0]

Cygwin means ported code - someone actually went through each POSIX utility and created a .exe binary that runs natively under Windows. Cygwin provides an emulation DLL called cygwin1.dll, but only for those ported binaries.

Lina is full-blown emulation, which means you take a Linux binary utility that nobody ever thought of porting to Win32, and you FTP it to a Windows machine, you run it on top of Lina and Lina intercepts any Linux system calls attempted by that program and does them itself.
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Edited June 3, 2008 by dserban (see edit history)

[ethergeek 0]

Cygwin means ported code - someone actually went through each POSIX utility and created a .exe binary that runs natively under Windows. Cygwin provides an emulation DLL called cygwin1.dll, but only for those ported binaries.
Lina is full-blown emulation, which means you take a Linux binary utility that nobody ever thought of porting to Win32, and you FTP it to a Windows machine, you run it on top of Lina and Lina intercepts any Linux system calls attempted by that program and does them itself.

OK...I read that site backwards then...thanks for the clarification. This seems pretty cool, but how does it handle things like library dependencies? I assume lina handles dynamic linking and all, but could I say, for instance, pop KDE and all it's prerequisites over to my windows machine and use kicker for my launcher, kdesktop for my shell, and kwin for window management?
Edited September 21, 2007 by ethergeek (see edit history)

[dserban 0]

It looks like their first baby step is to provide application level virtualization (kind of like the philosophy that Citrix employs) ... and see how that goes. Whole desktop environment virtualization may be in their future, who knows.
If that's what you're looking for, then have a look at andLinux (http://www.andlinux.org/). It is a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows 2000 based systems (2000, XP, 2003, Vista [32-bit only]). andLinux is not just for development and runs almost all Linux applications in Windows without modification. It supports quick launch icons, start menu, system tray, Explorer shell extensions and file type associations.
It's great for those who for whatever reason are stuck running windows, yet still want to use a few Linux apps. I'm pretty much stuck in Windows while at work. However, it would be really nice to be able to run Linux apps at the same time.
Cygwin is more a Linux compatibility layer, it's core is basically a DLL that accepts Linux/POSIX syscalls from applications. This uses a fullblown Linux kernel. So I think this would probably take more memory in exchange for better compatibility. But's it's probably a little less integrated (the website mentions no printing support).
For a start, cygwin isn't a way to run native Linux binaries in Windows.
Cygwin is an emulator, while andLinux is a virtual OS. I have run virtual OSs in Windows and they are much slower because they take up lots of memory (remember, its an entire other OS). Since cygwin only emulates the shell and X-server, it only takes up as much memory as needed for that program, and nothing more.
Here's an idea - don't run explorer.exe on startup and instead run andLinux as your desktop.
sarcasm
Doing it this way seems to give you all the security and stability of Windows combined with the user-friendlyness of Linux apps.
/sarcasm
The next step - I believe - will be a significantly better way of running Windows inside Linux (and there already are many ranging from wine/cedega/qemu/busybox/xen/kvm/etc).
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Edited June 3, 2008 by dserban (see edit history)