How to Switch Between Operating Systems Without Reboot?
Is it possible to switch into a Windows environment from Ubuntu without rebooting the computer?
17 Answers
Not as I think you mean. The only way to go from a proper "bare metal" install of Ubuntu to a "bare metal" install of Windows is through BIOS.
However, virtualisation might be an option (it is for me). I only have a few Windows applications that I occasionally need for work (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks) that don't work acceptably with with Wine. I use VirtualBox to boot a "virtual" install of Windows. Note this requires quite a powerful machine with plenty of RAM to run really well.
Wine is another option. Wine allows you to run some Windows applications on Ubuntu but the coverage is a lot lower for most applications than a virtualised environment.
If you explain what you're trying to do in Windows, perhaps we can explain the best of those solutions.
1Using a "Bare Metal" hypervisor for virtual machines (such as VMware) may allow you to do this. There is a cost in resources of course. This is not the sort of VM where one OS is the host and another a guest ... both are equal, and run under a thin low-level hypervisor.
2Run one operating system as a guest in a virtual machine, with the other system as a host. (You can also run both as guests inside a hypervisor.)
If you want good integration between Windows and Linux, and don't mind running Windows as the primary operating system, you can run coLinux, which is a virtualized Linux running on top of Windows. There is an Ubuntu-based distribution of coLinux: andLinux.
1No, not with a dual boot setup. The only way to come close to this is to install Windows in a virtual machine using software such as Virtualbox. Virtualbox can be installed from the Ubuntu Software Centre (just search 'virtualbox').
You will need to go for the newest hybrid laptops.
....Lenovo's new dual CPU, dual-OS ThinkPad X1 Hybrid is perhaps the most fully realized attempt yet to give users Linux and Windows in a well-designed portable machine. Lenovo's laptop, which will be shown at the Consumer Electronic Show next week, can switch between Linux and Windows with one click, and runs Linux on a dual-core Qualcomm chip....
If you just need to run some windows applications, you might try using wine. Just do
sudo apt-get install wineand when install is finished, you just download some program for windows and go to file properties -> Permissions -> mark Allow executing this file as program.
Then you just normally double click on that exe file. Many programs work pretty good with wine.
No, because each operating system is different. If you needed to install inside of a Virtual Machine and run an operating system inside another.
