Download CoLinux 0.6.2

CoLinux is an open source project that makes it possible to run Linux alongside another operating system. For example, with CoLinux, which stands for Cooperative Linux, Linux can be run on Windows 2000 or XP without the need for software such as VMWare. At the moment it is possible to run Knoppix via CoLinux on Windows, see screenshot at the bottom of this post. A few days ago version 0.6.2 of this program was released and the changelog of it looks like this:

Changes in version 0.6.2:

• The entire configuration can be passed on the command line instead of using an XML file (working towards UML compatibility). Read doc/colinux-daemon.
• Linux patch ported to Linux 2.6.10. Linux 2.4.x will not be officially supported anymore. (Dan Aloni and George Boutwell). If you use an old root file image you might need to fix it, read about moving to 2.6.x in the Wiki site (
• Implemented a Cooperative file system driver in Linux, that makes it possible to mount host OS directories in Linux, similar to UML’s hostfs. It lets you access your C: without using Samba or other network file systems. Read doc/cofs.
• coLinux should now work under PAE setups and AMD64 setups that enable the NX bit (specifically, Windows XP SP2).
• The slirp network daemon was added. This network daemon provides easy-to-set-up outbound network communication from coLinux without using the TAP driver or PCAP library.
• initrd support was added (teesoft2004 at yahoo.com.cn). To activate it you can specify eg in the configuration, or initrd=filename in the command line.
• Bug fix: Reception and delivery of network packets bigger than 2kb.
• Bug fix: Consoles and/or other daemons fail to connect to colinux-daemon on startup (this is Windows only).
• Bug fix: Stop reboots where different gcc compiler versions are used to compile linux.sys & vmlinux, with an error/warning (George Boutwell).
• Bug fix: Proper floating point state preservation in the Linux guest. coLinux now passes the flops20 test program.
• Bug fix: A tiny memory leak when coLinux is shutting down.
• Bug fix: Proper reference counting of the driver in the Linux port.
• Bug fix: The network driver (conet) now verifies checksums (as
• Changed PCAP handling to use Connection Name instead of Adapter/Device/Driver name. Name is now uniform between PCAP & TAP and multiple devices of the same/make/model should be able to be connected to. (George Boutwell)
• Support AltGr for both FLTK & NT consoles. (Sascha Kettler)
• Added a coserial daemon (only Linux for now), that allows one to open a serial terminal to the guest machine. (You can run /sbin/mgetty ttyS0, etc.)
• Improved debugging – we now have a debug messages “collector” deamon named colinux-debug-deamon, which collects debug messages from all the coLinux components. This also changes the way things are printed when you run the daemon (it is now easier to see what belongs to what). All debug messages are off by default, so things may go a little faster.
• An API version number was added to make sure that you use the right vmlinux and user-space executables with the right coLinux driver (previously it caused crashes if the APIs changed).
• Added block device aliasing, eg alias=”hda2″. You can specify such an alias in the element in the configuration XML and expect coLinux to mount it, even when passed with root=. NOTE: The cobdX device and its alias are mutual exclusive, which means that you can’t mount both of them at the same time.
• Implemented a new timer for the Linux guest, this should fix time-going-back issues.
• Improved message passing, which may boost networking a bit.
• Win32 TAP driver upgraded to version 8.1. This version doesn’t bring any changes to the actual driver code. However it was released in order to notify the other projects that bundle the TAP driver along with their software, to modify the name identifer of the driver so that multiple TAP driver users can coexist (eg, OpenVPN with coLinux). Therefore, coLinux now installs its TAP driver as TAPxxxxco (where xxxx is the driver version). After installing it, you will notice ” (coLinux)” appended to the device name in the Network Connections manager. The old driver will remain until it is uninstalled.
• If the MAC address is unspecified, a random MAC is chosen using the familiar TAP prefix (00:FF:XX:XX:XX:XX).
• Enhanced coLinux keyboard handling support (sends raw scan codes from Windows to linux) (Nuno Lucas).
• Change memory allocation so that the RAM for the VM is not allocated on startup, but on-demand. This means the coLinux loads faster and less prune to memory allocation failures in the host.

[break] Click for a larger version.