In the past, I tried running Linux under Windows or vice versa, but with mixed results. Topologilinux is ideal — it lets you run Linux under Windows OR boot the very same copy of Linux. But it is not maintained very rapidly and it is based on Slackware, which I don’t find as nice as some of the newer distributions. I’ve also used VirtualPC and Parallels to run Linux inside Windows, but it was never very seamless.

The other day my Parallels installation croaked beyond repair, so I decided to try something new. I had noticed that VirtualBox was now open source. This is similar to Paralells, VirtualPC, VMWare, etc. But two things have combined to make this a winning choice: First, VirtualBox has drivers you can install on supported operating systems (including Linux) that do a few neat tricks. In particular, it makes the mouse operate transparently! With most virtualizers, the mouse gets “captured” inside Linux (or whatever you are running) and you have to do a funny keystroke to escape to the regular OS. With VirtualBox you just click inside Linux or click inside Windows — its all the same.

So one way to use this is to just put VirtualBox running Linux (I’m using kubuntu which is very nice) full screen on one monitor and let Windows have the other monitor. Works great.

The second thing I’ve been using to assist this, though is a piece of shareware called AltDesk. This is a piece of software that lets you have a bunch of virtual windows (there are others out there, but this one is very powerful and integrates well with the ultra-cool Windows shell called Aston from the same company). AltDesk can start programs automatically when you switch to a desktop for the first time, so you can make a virtual Linux desktop and switch between them at will. I keep the AltDesk bar at the bottom of my 2nd monitor (like a task bar) and use it to switch between desktops.

Performance is good although I’ll confess that 2GB of RAM and a dual core clocked at about 2.2GHz probably doesn’t hurt.

More great open source!

The problem with getting those Emacs commands ingrained in your head (or your fingers) is that you then have to use other programs! It is very painful to use Word or an IDE without those Emacs keystrokes.

I’m writing this on a Windows box using Firefox in a Blogger HTML editor. But guess what? Control+A takes me to the start of the line, Control+W cuts, and Control+Y pastes! Why? I’m running xkeymacs, a nice free program that lets you map Emacs keystrokes for Windows applications.

It does take a little work to get everything just right. For example, I added ^X-0 (zero) to send Firefox a Control+W which closes the current tab. ^X-2 can create a new tab. It is a little tricky to add new things (but not too bad, you just have to edit a text file with a lisp-like syntax). You also need to set it up so each program has its own settings (which means you can disable it for certain programs, or change Control+W to send escape (for Thunderbird, for example).

You can find xkeymacs here: http://www.cam.hi-ho.ne.jp/oishi/indexen.html

If you prefer just “fixing” Office applications, you might try: http://www.rath.ca/Misc/VBacs/

Oh, and if you don’t think Emacs is powerful enough, here’s some food for thought: http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html

There’s a great plug in that allows you to edit files on remote machines using emacs, called — amusingly enough — tramp. The home page is at http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ and if you use Cygwin, you might check out: http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/~cplager/cygwin.html.

The system relies on ssh (well, technically scp). If you want to edit a remote file you just open up a “file name” like /[theal@www.myremotemachine.com]/home/theal/public_html/index.html and tramp copies it down, allows you to edit the file and then pushes it back to the server when you save it.

Really cool!

Don’t expect too much. You’ll need to compile the source code (if you use Cygwin, be prepared to copy /usr/include/limits.h to /usr/include/linux/limits.h or fix the source). And then you get a command line tool that reads single-column TIFF files from the command line. But the accuracy is much better than most of the cheap OCR tools out there.

Try it here.