Hi guys,

I've been roaming the forums and hammering Google this morning looking for applications that runs Linux from the Windows desktop... 'VMware' I hear you shout, 'Virtualbox' from another corner, with whimpers of 'Wubi' in the background.

What I'm looking for is something that doesn't need to be installed on Windows first. I've looked at Qemu as I remembered a live Debian distro with this which loaded up on a double-click and no installation at all but I cannot find it now and see how it was made, plus the Qemu instructions are pretty thin.

Does anybody know of an app that can do this, or a USB Debian based distro that can be customised that works this way? As far as I can see everything requires installation upfront .

Thanks for any help.

What you might be looking for is colinux http://www.colinux.org/ or jslinux http://bellard.org/jslinux/

Or this one: http://www.andlinux.org/

Thanks guys,

jslinux looks amazing as an experiment. I looked at Colinux but I think I ended up on an old page the first time round 'cos the information was different. It also appears to be the closest I will get to running on Windows, even though it requires admin privileges. I found the Debian distro on a CD I've got at home. It does indeed run on Windows 7 through Qemu and unlike my Ubuntu live CD it doesn't ask for admin access, though it is painfully slow.

andLinux looks nice but the homepage does say that it requires installation within Windows.

Thanks again....