The Portable Ubuntu for Windows team has made available an Ubuntu distribution that runs fully inside of Windows using the coLinux kernel. The concept is fascinating, but it does fall down in a few places. First of all, on my Acer Aspire One, it takes a very long time to get started, which is probably fair because it is starting up an entire OS inside of the current one. Also, it seems to use a significant amount of RAM. This causes a lot of swapping on this 1G machine. Finally, the recent news about the project is related to some documentation updates, not to a new release. The currently available release is from mid last year and is of Ubuntu 804.
The project seems interesting and may prove to be the answer I am looking for regarding some easy Linux development on this notebook, but it’s not quite there yet, and relatively out of date.
