A couple of months ago I set up a PC for my dad, mom, and the rest of my family. I set it up to dual-boot between Windows XP and Gentoo Linux. This is probably nothing new to most computer geeks. What is newsworthy is that coLinux played a major part in this installation, and it's giving the computer surprising capabilities.

coLinux starts as an invisible service when my family boots into XP. It's accessible to Windows through a normal IP address (using XP's network bridge feature.) To make files accessible from both operating systems, I partitioned the hard drive so that most of the space is an ext3 filesystem. In Windows, my family reaches that space in Windows via Samba. What's more, I can ssh to the box even when they are running Windows.

Today that preparation paid off. My brother asked about a version of the Game of Life that I've demonstrated before. With a huge board, great speed, and a large library of interesting "life forms", gtklife is a major leap over all other versions I've played with, and it's for Unix, not Windows. My brother wanted it, so I ssh'ed to the box (which happened to be running Windows at the time) and typed emerge gtklife. A moment later I told him it was ready and he switched to Linux.

Admittedly, coLinux wasn't a breeze to install, but it worked well once I figured out the XML configuration file and made minor changes to init scripts so that coLinux would boot from the same root partition as a normal Linux boot. I think Linux distributors should try to integrate coLinux into their products, because it really opens up a lot of possibilities.