On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 01:05:35PM +1200, David Nicholls wrote:

Basically my problem is this: I have an academic who is running win2k. He also has just purchased a scientific program that runs in linux. However he also does not want to have to dual-boot or purchase anthing more. Thinking along these lines

as far as both he and I could remember, mandrake allowed you to create an image that you could load to from within windows and was doing a lot of marketing on this ability a while back. I haven't seen anything more about this on their site, so I don't know about this anymore. In the end I just need to know if it can be done with any of the distros rather than a VM of some sort.

Ah, academics eh? an early way to run linux was to run it from dos, using the loadlin.exe program. However, that is pretty much equivalent to dual booting. I would suggest that he runs the linux software remotely on linux machine and use an X server for windows to access the remote machine and view the result. The cygwin xfree86 port works very well. John