Best program to run Linux on top of Windows

I'm needing Linux to use a simple, academic, program. I'll probably also use it for learning a bit of the Unix shell's functions. But still, nothing special.
I was thinking of using some sort of virtualization, to have Linux running on top of Windows Vista.

Can anyone recommend me a good software for this (I'm using Vista x64)?

One last thing: usually, in Vista, my RAM usage is around 3.2 GB (I have a total of 4 GB). Will I have sufficient RAM to use (and change) both Operating System fast?

Thanks.

 

I use VMware Server. It's free. Performance is not great (you need to pay for that), but it should suit your needs.

Get it here.

You should have enough RAM for using VMware with a Linux system.

 

you could use microsoft virtual machine or sun virtual box, all you need to do is install and away you go!! and there are no limitations like on VM ware.

good luck!

fattail95

 

or you can use Small Linux (DSL) it fits on a 60mb usb drive gives you basic linux functions and can be expanded to a full desktop os

 

Actually, Microsoft's VM program will not run linux. I recommend Virtualbox, it's free, fast, and has a few cool features like seamless mode, USB, etc.

You may also want to check out this. It's basically a full Ubuntu system that can be run seamlessly with Windows.

 

It does actually... but the extensions only work with .rpm based distros, it's a pain to get working otherwise. I've run Debian and Fedora on Virtual PC 2007. It was much easier with Fedora but it's not my favorite distro. In any event, I wouldn't recommend using it because of the headaches, but it *does* work.

 

I liked cygwin, but its more of a console emulator than anything else. You should be able to run programs though. I used cygwin to SSH into linux machines to work for a year or so and had no complaints. Actually running linux is much better though .

 

I've found personally that Cygwin does everything I need unless it's to install a full Linux distro that attempts to be Windows itself. It's much more convenient than using any kind of virtual machine. It's not a real Linux OS under the hood, but it certainly acts exactly as if it was, without the hassle, potential problems and RAM limitations of VM's such as VMware, Virtualbox and Virtual PC. One nice thing about is that to Cygwin, your entire Windows file system is a unix file system, and so you can bash away to your heart's content with all the files and folders you have.

I would go so far as to say that a person who really uses Cygwin and its non-GUI gnu software will learn more about using unix-like systems than someone who just uses a full Linux distro. But there's also plenty of x-window software to use if you want to.

 

You probably see 3.2GB of RAM "usage", but that's not the whole picture. A lot of that is file caches and such that can be dropped with no problem for a program that wants the memory. How many and what kinds of programs do you typically run along with wanting to run the virtual machine? That will tell you more about whether or not you can really run it fine.

Besides, with most distros you don't need to allocate more than 256-512MB of memory to the virtual machine, so even ignoring all your current RAM usage I'd suspect that there's no problem.

 

Instead of using virtualization or porting like cygwin, you can actually
run real linux under windows: check topologylinux or co-linux. However it may be too complicated for your modest needs.

cygwin would provide good imitation of linux only on the level of user experience and programs.

 

Thanks for the tip, i didn't know about the Sun Virtual Box, so i gave it try immediately and i found, that its easy to install and configure on windows. First time i've been setting it up, it took me some like 15 minutes + other 30 minutes of installation of linux.
I tried it on my notebook with windows xp x64bit as host OS with centos 64bit as guest OS and works to perfection.
I'll try same only contrary - with linux as host OS.

 

perhaps this will be interesting
http://www.wubi-installer.org/