Trying to find "run-from-Windows-file" linux

I remember hearing of a Linux version that could be installed as a file within Windows, & then run from that file.

Is there such? If so, what is it? Link?

10Q!

 

andLinux may be what you're thinking of.
Dedoimedo has a tutorial here.

 

Maybe Cooperative Linux?

 

Windows Based Ubuntu Installer (wubi)
It creates a file in your Windows file system that functions as a linux file system, then you reboot and select Linux as Operating System, which will than use that file.
The advantage it that you don' t need to repartition your drive and you can easily uninstall if you like.

 

In the good old days some distros would come with QEMU or Bochs. It would be dog slow but you could run a whole OS in user space (i.e. not requiring admin access) without installing 3rd party software and without rebooting the system.
Those two are "emulators" and compared to a modern virtualisation program no match in terms of performance, integration and features.

Wubi is an alternative to dualbooting. I think I remember this had a predecessor as well. Back then you would install the OS on a FAT partition which could be used by Windows and Linux before NTFS-3g, the bootloader would be a floppy or CD.
andLinux and coLinux are petty much a mess. A somewhat cleaner approach is cygwin which basically is a port of gnu utils to win32. Cygwin/X expands that to graphical apps as well but its usage is mostely restricted to X forwarding, but basically it's all there even including GNOME and KDE. The latter is now cross platform anyway with version 4 (still alpha though).
Besides being hard to set up and being a pain to use these options offer outdated packages and not much support. Primary reason: no one is using them anymore because:

If you got a somewhat powerful PC or laptop there is no point in using any of these options. Virtualbox and VMware are so much better in every regard. You get the latest distros with a fully functional package manager. These are well tested products with few bugs, very stable and the integration with the host OS is much improved compared to the old emulators. Install the guest drivers and you can use seamless mouse mode or even "seamless windows" (Unity or what it's called if you know what I mean).

 

I used to use portable ubuntu, it lets you run ubuntu natively in windows.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/portableubuntu/

 

From what I can see this is a prepackaged Cygwin environment with Xming instead of Cygwin/X.
It also proves my point, accodring to the sourceforge "forum" and time stamps
it's not actively maintained
is stuck at karmic
doesn't quite work that well
doesn't support x64 "hosts"
...

It a really nice idea though.

 

WUBI is the one I was trying to remember. THANKS!

I will try the other suggestions when I get a round tuit. Thanks to all who posted.

 

Wubi is easy to set up if you want dual booting as opposed to running windows and linux side by side. But it comes at the cost of some disk performance and inflexibility compared to setting up a native partition for Linux. It will still be faster than all the other options mentioned.

 

you can get wubi in mint linux (ubuntu fork) also you can get wubi in ubuntu alternative download as well