You can run Linux and Windows applications in the same time on Windows 7 by using Slax or any Linux distribution in a virtual machine. Slax is a lightweight (highly compressed through 7-zip compression ), portable and fast Linux distribution with a modular structure: beside the wide range of pre-installed software, the user is able to add the desired application through a module that does not need to be installed or configured. Practically a custom Slax distribution is easy to build in order to have personalized applications for Internet browsing, CD and DVD ripping, multimedia playback, office related tasks management and more (related article: Dual Boot Windows 7 And XP Easily: Windows 7 Installation Directly From XP Without A LiveDVD).

Slax can exist on a Windows 7 desktop in a virtual machine. It is distributed as ISO image for usage on a CD or an USB drive. To deploy Slax on Windows 7, you will need an utility like Sun xVM VirtualBox, MobaLiveCD or VMware player. If you will try to deploy Slax using MobaLiveCD, which is based on QEMU (an open source machine emulator and virtualizer), the time needed to start is high, the desktop icons will not be displayed and also a Windows 7 Blue Screen Of Death could appear.

We have tried VMware player instead, and Slax showed a high speed of response during the running in a virtual machine in Windows 7, but in the same conditions on a Windows XP desktop it will run faster.

If you want to test the Slax features on Windows 7, first the free VMware player must be downloaded and installed. Then download the Slax CD ISO image and this virtual machine configuration file. By double clicking the virtual machine configuration file, you will see the Slax desktop in a few seconds. In this way, any Linux application could be executed from the Windows 7 desktop.

There are many advantages of Slax as compared with other Linux distributions. The compressed modular structure offers it more speed because the time needed to decompress a module is lower than reading entire data from a disk.

On the other hand, Slax will automatically detect and save changes, if it runs from a writable media. It is released in 28 different languages and could improve the performances of older computers (installed as standalone system) because it only requires 30 MB of free RAM available for boot.

Slax On Windows 7 Screenshot Tour

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 2:52 am and is filed under Operating Systems, Windows Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.