Hi for a while now i have been trying to find out if it is possible to have 2 operating systems running at the same time on 1 box. I would like to have Fedcora Core 1 and WinXP running at the same time. Cuz there are some programs that I use that dont work with wine, like Poser and Lightwave 7 and vice versa for Linux using Cygwin. And have the ability to transfer files back and forth with ease between the 2 OS's.

Does anyone know what to do, or know of any software that does this? Hehe free software would be really nice Thanks alot.

NeoSpawn

No, you can't run two operating systems simultaneously. An operating system controls access to hardware. You would have a never-ending series of conflicts between Linux wanting to use the RAM, hardrive, video card etc. and Windows trying to do similar operations. To accomplish something like that, you would need an operating system to coordinate/supervise linux and windows, and nothing like that exists. The best you can do is run an emulator (like wine or Cygwin)... unless of course, you write that supervising system

There is vmware too, but it'll cost you

To run Linux from within Windows - Cygwin.

Thanks alot to ur replies I looked at VMWare and its wellllll a lil expensive =^_^= I guess ill just make a 2 box system that i can switch between and network together. Time to throw out the bed i guess lol

NeoSpawn

bochs.
coLinux

hold on a minute ...

besides VMware theres another one that got bought by MS so they stuck their name on it.

I forgot what it used to be called but now its called "Microsoft Virtual PC". http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/

its very similar to VMware and you get to run it for 45 days. two weeks ago it was 60 days.

Alternatives...

Don't know about coLinux, but BOCHs is FREAKING SLOW.

I successfully installed Windows 2000 in a Bochs virtual drive on an Athlon 1.4ghz T-Bird machine with 512MB of RAM once. Even when I optimized the virtual CPU frequencies, I still got performance on the virtual 2000 install on par with about a 200mhz Pentium MMX.

win4lin is really fast.

But only runs Win98 and WinME?


Cheers,
Tink

Check out this review of Win4lin.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1112

i have never checked it out but i am planning on it.

i was a win4lin beta tester about 3 years ago. a bunch of us were mad you couldn't run it as root. i don't blame them for not letting you though. i was advocating a secret switch to run as root if necessary. it installed win98 super fast. setup to done was 2 minutes. and when you shutdown windows, and restarted it, it was like "Bam!" right back up. windows crashes were hardly an inconvenience.

Thank you all for responding to my topic. Didnt realize there were that many programs out there that did what I asked for. I need to look into all the programs on here. But i have figured out 1 thing.......i need more RAM if im gonna do this.

I saw that there is developement for GNOME2 on Cygwin, CyGnome . I was looking at the screen shots and they look promising. But i havent gotten it to run just yet.

NeoSpawn

PS: Is Win4Lin able to run WinXp?

no xp win4lin.