Hello all,

I would like to run linux on windows 7 starter.
Google tells me that I have to upgrade at least to home premium to have windows virtual pc, but that is not for free..
besides I don t need xp, i just want to run linux..

So I would like to know if there is another way, a free program/virtual machine for win 7 to run linux on.

Thanks for your help,

Try VirtualBox.

1 members found this post helpful.

I will :-)
Thank you so much ¡¡

if you DO NOT want to dual boot then think about installing MinGW/ Msys and or Cygwin.
They cmd line LINUX that run on Ms Windows .I have been using them since 2001 and about 75 ot 90 % of linux programs ( text only ) will run.

and there is a xfree 86 install that can run GUI tools .

Quite frankly, I would not give the time o' day to any of Windows' "Home" editions.

Buy a full-retail version of whatever Windows version you prefer, Professional or better. Licensed, original, fully paid-for, from a known legitimate source, absolutely up-and-up. Keep a couple photocopies of the credit card receipt and invoice. If you do Windows (as most of us do, at least from time to time), it's well worth it.

If you simply need to run certain bits of Linux/Unix software, then "cross platform" implementations of everything you might need are actually quite routinely available.

My first good experience with Linux was running Fedora 11 under Windows 7 RC via Virtualbox. I highly recommend it, but probably not for extended use, because the max screen resolution was 800x600 and many settings windows/dialogs were bigger than the screen. That didn't bother me much because after a few days I was confident enough to erase Windows .

Thanks for the feedback :-)

The only reason why the laptop runs windows is because of the wireless.
I travel a lot, and help is always around when wireless doesnt work and you re in a hurry.
I also have an ibook with osx and with debian on it, and when wireless didnt work on either, no one around could help, so i bought a windows laptop.

The reason I want to run debian is because i know nothing of windows..i never ran it, i have 4 desktops and a laptop all running debian and bsd.
so for anything else but wireless :P I need debian.

and I couldn t make a dualboot because the win7 laptop didnt come with an install cd and I wouldnt know how to reinstall it.
so I thought virtualbox would be an option for me.
that aside.
---

Virtualbox runs relatively well and is faster then I thought it would be.
I installed the addons,
and from there it went all wrong because my touchpad didnt work anymore.
So I couldnt get it the pointer captured anymore to open a terminal and change my xorg.conf

Now I m back running it without addons, which means that i cannot set my resolution.
and i have to scroll a lot so i like to change it.

My question is:
How do I find out what to put in xorg.conf for my touchpad? It is a hp mini.
Is there a program that can generate the lines? (like there is gft for modelines)

and is there a way to reach xorg.conf from out of virtualbox? ,from within windows?

Happy Newyear

I've got Windows 7 Home Premium installed and have no problems with it (though I am only using it for gaming).

There's a tool for mounting virtual drives; see this: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=4748
Once mounted you should be able to mess around with the files.

You can also run coLinux, but it sounds like for you, you're better off with virtualbox. Even better, make a bare metal backup of your machine with dd or clonezilla or Acronis to reinstall Windows later if you want and then just go and install Debian...

I don't see much difference between the "home" and "professional" versions of Windows, so anything that's not "starter" should do. As far as I can say, having used the Windows 7 Starter for a few moments, that thing should not cost a cent, it's so restricted. Yet it's probably the only version that notebooks are truly capable of running, having been stripped of the annoying resource hog Aero. Probably it wouldn't even exist if there were no netbooks around with "small" CPU and memory (yet bigger than high-end machines were some time ago...operating systems have really stepped up on resource usage). All in all, if I wanted a "real" operating system I wouldn't pick Windows at all because of it's restrictions.

The netbooks that come with Windows 7 preinstalled but do not have a cd/dvd writer in them are practically floating on luck. They work just like a lot of Windows presinstalled desktops do: you don't get any setup discs, but instead there's a partition on the harddisk that contains the setup files for recovery. You're supposed to create your own set of rescue discs (at your own cost), which at least on HP machines says to run "only one time" (so don't fail it), but you cannot do that because the program only works with a cd/dvd writer which netbooks don't have. So all in all you pretty much cannot create a rescue disc unless you obtain a portable writer that you can plug in through USB for example (I'm not sure if you could fool the thing by creating a virtual drive that produced an image file, but especially on Windows and especially especially on a "starter" version that sounds like a distant dream). So unless you're completely sure you never ever want to see that Windows installation again, do not overwrite or erase it before getting an optical disc writer from someplace (a friend maybe?) and creating the damn discs. A word of warning: even though you create that (perhaps just one) set of discs, you cannot count on them working. I've been in the situation where the self-created disc set was seemingly all right, checked by the recovery disc creation software, but when they were used the progress got stuck at some point because some files could not be read from the disc. Therefore you should indeed consider creating a recovery image of the whole disk in case you need it, in addition to creating the "official" recovery disc (set). Of course you can call whoever made/sold that computer, but don't count on them sending you a Windows disc for recovery (HP does it at least sometimes, but I'm not sure on the others).

A virtual machine isn't even close to a real installation and on a netbook the resources might make it even worse at some point. So when (if) you find it slow or sluggish, know that it could be smoother were it a real installation..