Mobile Ubuntu Colinux Setup

My Vista Home Premium finally arrived. Since I have a Ati 9250 at work, which is a smartly rebranded DirectX 8 card, I was craving for the full "vista experience". After doing some backup I installed Vista on my laptop and spent some time setting up the basic programs I need. Since installing colinux is one of the great challenges of the Game Of Windows I'll try to present you a step-by-step guide to a working mobile colinux setup in Vista.


My goal is to set up a colinux configuration for truely mobile computing. That means that I use wireless networking in Windows and Kubuntu natively as my primary networking interface. I want colinux networking to work whenever my Windows has network access and I want a single configuration on linux and Windows. The configuration you find here is based on the two years I use colinux now and constant fidling with the configuration parameters.

As a prerequisite you need a running GNU/Linux on your computer. I installed an Kubuntu Feisty onto a spare partition. Kubuntu is my favorite distribution at the moment, because you get up-to-date basic packages like in debian/sid, and up-to-date KDE packages like SuSE. After installing GNU/Linux I rebooted into Vista. Let's rumble.

First I installed colinux 0.8.0 pre from Henry Nestler. My experience with colinux is that the latest unstable you can get at Henry's site is the most stable version available.

Once you installed it (you can safely skip downloading the linux image, we'll boot from a real partition instead) head to C:\Programme\coLinux and copy example.conf to colinux.conf. Now edit colinux.conf with WordPad. Since I have activated UAC I can't simply edit the system file but use an administrator notepad. Start - Type "Notepad" - Right Click the appearing notepad and select "Run as administrator...".

Now my colinux configuration looks like this:

kernel=vmlinux

# my swap partition
sda3=\\Device\\Harddisk0\\Partition3

# my root partition
# I usually have to play around with the partition numbers before
# I get the final digit right. 
sda4=\\Device\\Harddisk0\\Partition4

# this should point to the root partition...
root=/dev/sda4
ro
initrd=initrd.gz
mem=768

# a slirp device for internet access; when I boot
# kubuntu natively, this is my wired ethernet device
eth0=slirp

# when I boot kubuntu natively this is my wireless
# connection; since I don't want any configuration
# changes from native to colinux I inserted a
# unusable eth1 device in the colinux configuration
eth1=pcap-bridge,"Unknown"

# internal high-speed connection between colinux
# and vista only
eth2=tuntap

# I want to see my Vista files and cdrom in colinux...
cofs0=c:
cofs1=d:
cofs2=e:

Now I can start colinux. Configuring the network devices takes some time, since the stuff is not yet configured on the linux side.

Edit /etc/network/interfaces. Remove the default entry for eth1 (it will be handled by knetworkmanager later, we don't want to use it in colinux) and change eth2 to a private network:

auto eth2
iface eth2 inet static
address 192.168.42.2
netmask 255.255.255.0

Now configure the tuntap device on Windows to ip 192.168.42.1. Start colinux and you should be able to ping colinux at 192.168.42.2 from Windows. You can't ping back since the Windows Vista Firewall is active on the tuntap device.

Install Xming and cygwin. Make sure you select openssh when installing cygwin, you'll need it later to log into your colinux.

Run XLaunch (from Xming) and configure an X Server without access control and save the configuration to your local documents directory. To start the X server without access control at login time link the config.xlaunch file into your Autostart menu. Make sure that you allow your X through the firewall. Don't do this if you don't have an extra firewall to the internet, since otherwise people from outside would be able to contact your X server!

Now you have to make sure you can log into your colinux from cygwin without a password. Luckily ssh features public-key based authentication, and it's not that hard to set up.

Start a cygwin shell.

ssh-keygen -t dsa

Copy the file to the .ssh directory on the colinux server. Make sure you have a .ssh directory in your $HOME before doing this:

scp .ssh/id_dsa.pub manuel@192.168.42.2:~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Now we're able to ssh manuel@192.168.42.2 without using a password. Edit a file konsole.bat on your desktop.

c:
cd \\cygwin\\bin
run bash --login -c 'ssh manuel@192.168.42.2 "export DISPLAY=192.168.42.1:0; konsole > /dev/null 2>&1"'

Now all that is left to do is to run colinux as a service. At an adminstrator command prompt (Start->Run "cmd", Right-Click->Run As Administrator) c:\Programme\coLinux write:

colinux-daemon.exe @colinux.conf --install-service colinux

Open "Services" as administrator and edit the properties of the colinux service. Set the start mode to automatic. Voila.

To access your windows partitions from colinux you can simply add them to your /etc/fstab:

0 /media/c cofs user,defaults,rw 0 0
1 /media/d cofs user,defaults,rw 0 0
2 /media/e cofs user,defaults,rw 0 0

Now your init-scripts will mount your cofs devices (a.k.a. Windows Drives) when colinux boots.

I use this configuration on a Dell XPS M170 laptop. Of course you can use it for workstations, too. I myself prefer a winpcap'ed configuration for workstations, though. It's easier to get access to the colinux that way. Unfortunately winpcapping the device doesn't work on most wireless networks in the wild.

See also:

Information Overflow & Colinux WLAN Networking

Colinux On Windows Vista