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spacemanaki
That's kind of cool, if a bit perverse. A much more practical solution is a headless Virtual Box running Ubuntu, which you SSH into and can install anything via apt-get, etc... I recently started using this on OS X (via Vagrant) and it's super useful, for instance having access Linux LaTeX packages instead of having to deal with MacTex (MacTex is probably fine, but the 1.5 gb download was crawling for me, while `apt-get install texlive` took a few minutes) For Windows I would imagine it would be even more useful, since fewer Unix tools are immediately available. I think I would probably prefer this to Cygwin, which was always a bit weird for me.
eberfreitas
This works great on Windows as well. I use Putty to SSH the Virtual Machine. I develop linux applications on my Windows machine seamlessly. It's really better than Cygwin, but I use Cygwin for some stuff like git. I also managed to install node.js with Cygwin, which is kind of cool!
bobds
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux

"Cooperative Linux, abbreviated as coLinux, is software which allows Microsoft Windows and the Linux kernel to run simultaneously in parallel on the same machine."

zokier
Imho cooperative linux critical flaw is that it doesn't share filesystem with the host windows
norswap
I totally agree, it makes it more efficient, but not more practical than the usual virtual machine.
apenwarr
Colinux has the ability to mount your windows fs nowadays. I think the Linux module is called "cofs".
tezza
Awesome. There's a lot I'd like to do without having to incur the overhead of a Virtual Machine

Like use the Linux BlueZ stack. But that still sounds remote at this stage.

hristov
I always thought mist Linux packages have some sort of Windows version.