An interesting development in the evolution of Linux, almost a new species of Linux as it were.

andLind is a native port of the Linux kernel and Ubuntu to run as an application under Windows 2000. The two versions support either XFCE or KDE. With a few restrcitions.

• It's 32-bit only and needs to install on an NT file system.

• It's much faster than emulation or virtualization, but still needs a farily powerful machine to perform well.

• For security reasons, it should only be used for a desktop environment.

• As near as I can gather from the forums (?), andLinux is using Windows hardware drivers, but seems to have occasional problems interfacing to equivalent Linux hardware classes. Exotic hardware that is directly incompatable with Linux may be incompatable with andLinux as well. This may well be a problem in the bridge code that will be corrected in later versions. We'll see.

The current release is a beta, but if the comments in the forum are any indication, most of KDE is running inside Windows and apparently running cleaner and faster than it ever has before. In other words, a major milestone.

andLnux should appeal to many Windows desktop users - the whole ordeal of disk partitioning is often too much for them. They also object to having to respond to a boot menu to select a boot partition. andLinux may have a bright future in history of Linux desktop computing.