Oh wow - I built something very like this at university so people could run Linux on their Windows systems (this was way before hardware virtualisation support was a thing). It created a file on the Windows filesystem that would be used as local storage, dropped a kernel and initrd on there, and left a shortcut on the desktop that if run would trigger a reboot that would then run loadlin. The actual root filesystem got mounted off NFS, but X11 config got written out automatically with some amazingly hackish shell scripts I wrote, and the net effect was people who needed Linux for their coursework could avoid needing to head to a lab. Of course, this only worked with Windows 95/98/ME, so it was only useful for a couple of years before 2000 and XP had taken over.
It's worth remembering that installing Linux used to be a lot. Partition resizing required you to defrag drives first, and risked losing all your data in the process. People were still using weird overlays that did transparent drive compression, and you were going to have a bad time in that case. X configuration tended to involve you having to manually pick drivers. Until XFree86 4.0 shipped in 2000, you had per-device X servers! Distros like this aimed to make it possible for users to actually run Linux without having to risk losing all their data and without having to know way more about their hardware than any reasonable person could be expected to (remember that we had more than 3 GPU vendors back then!), and this sort of project really set the scene for projects like Ubuntu a few years later on.
Archive of the original website of the distribution: [0]
This takes advantage of the UMSDOS filesystem driver [1]:
> All the Linux files will be installed in a normal FAT directory (usually c:\LINUX). This directory is then mounted by UMSDOS as the root linux directory. All the extra file attributes (long names, permissions) are stored in a separate file (--linux-.---) in the respective directory."
I remember using ZipSlack [2], a version of Slackware using UMSDOS that could fit on a Zip disk. It could also be booted from the Zip.
There was also DragonLinux [3] which used a loopback file system requiring only a single file containing the image of the native Linux file system.
In the 90ies Linux could be the guest on MS-DOS/Windows' native filesystem (UMSDOS). In the 20ies, Windows can be the guest on one of Linux' native filesystems (BTRFS).
I love the Y2K disclosure. I was a kid at the time so all I remember are the stickers on everything.
> YEAR 2000 READINESS DISCLOSURE
> The WinLinux 2000 Program has been designed and tested to work for our customers in the Year 2000. We will continue to provide detailed information to customers about Year 2000 readiness, but contractual warranties specific to Year 2000 readiness are not appropriate given the nature of Year 2000 issues and the simple fact that a single technology provider, even one as well prepared for the Year 2000 as JRCP USA L.L.C., cannot solve all issues related to the Year 2000 transition, and are hereby expressly disclaimed. The information we disseminate about Year 2000 readiness does not constitute an additional warranty for the WinLinux 2000 Program; JRCP USA L.L.C. merely provides this information to assist our customers in evaluating and correcting potential issues for using dates into the next century.
There's not much online about this, but this from Handwiki [1]
>> WinLinux is a Linux distribution with an installer that runs from inside the Windows operating system. It also has a configuration tool that can be run inside of Windows to set up the hardware options of the Linux OS. It is installed to a directory on an existing FAT32 partition, which means it has the ability to share the Windows partition and disk space.
The latest version is WinLinux 2003. It can be launched like a Windows application from a shortcut, which causes the PC to reboot into WinLinux. Exiting out of WinLinux will allow the PC to go back into Windows on the next bootup. It is able to run Linux applications, and ships with KDE as the default desktop.
At the turn of the millennium when I got my first Linux, SuSE Linux 6.x IIRC, I was a teenager who thought Linux was the coolest thing in computing, and tried my hardest to find a Windows-like distro for my father, an electronic engineer that realistically only needed his Microchip IDE (MPLAB) to be able to switch. He passed away in 2006, and he was still on Windows XP at the time.
I am pleased to see that MPLAB now runs on Linux. Now we also got Windows gaming on Linux. The Linux desktop is still a bit of a rough experience, but how things have improved over the past few years... Windows shitting the bed and macOS becoming more and more iOS-like probably are making Linux look better than is actually is.
The issue that WinLinux 2000 & co. tried to focus on was creating a Windows-like GUI. That was never the problem; macOS thrives and it's very different than Windows. The issue always was applications, and a custom skin on a custom distro was not enough to convince the ones on the fence like my father.
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Please allow me a small rant: Valve has done an outstanding job with Proton, but I have never been very pleased with the state of Wine, since its inception. It feels it always falls short on usability, that running even trivial applications requires jumping through obscure hoops. (case in point: some Windows app wants to run as Administrator. Good luck doing so in Wine today. You can find 15-year out of date wikis referencing incantations that do not work anymore.) Many applications would run on Wine, but require a particular option or library, that if you don't know about and can't parse the verbose output, you are out of luck. They have an AppDB, but it's out-of-date and pretty much nobody uses it—I'm not even sure regular users can contribute to it.
I don't know if it's a governance or funding problem, but it's not like Wine feels incomplete because it's following a moving target; it instead feels like it's limping along, underdocumented, fragile, which makes Valve's work even more impressive.
http://www.colinux.org/