Install Linux Software on Windows with Ulteo Virtual Desktop

By Josh | May 27, 2008

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about Ulteo Virtual Desktop, and how it can easily install Linux software on Windows. So I decided to give it a try. I was thinking that it would be like andLinux, but it seems to be a little more stable. Also, Ulteo is based off of KDE. Installing Ulteo took up between 1.5 and 2 GB of space on my hard drive. After installation, there was no restart required, which was very nice.

The applications that come installed with Ulteo are nice, but of course it doesn’t include everything I want. Amarok is one of the pieces of software that I was glad to see. Being on Windows, I have missed using Amarok. It is a very nice music player. However, I seemed to run into a problem of getting Amarok to access my music on my Windows partitions. Ulteo did not mount my other partitions, and there didn’t seem any easy way of doing this. A quick search on the Ulteo forums found this, which explains how to mount your Windows partitions to folders on your Desktop. After taking care of that, I tried playing some music with Amarok, and it worked.

I then wanted to see if I could install an application called Tasque, which I also miss from Linux. Tasque is a Remember The Milk desktop client for Linux. I headed to the Tasque download page, downloaded it, and then tried to compile it. The problem with this is that Ulteo doesn’t come with everything you need to compile new software. You can’t even use apt-get to find everything you need. However, another quick look on the forums showed me this, which explains how to get Ulteo to use the Ubuntu repositories. This isn’t suggested by Ulteo, but it seems to work. Now, I’m just in the process of installing the things I need to compile Tasque.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep Ulteo running on my computer since I seem to have too many things running right now, but it definitely is a nice way to run some of my favorite Linux apps without having to reboot into Ubuntu. It’s also perfect for those of you who are afraid of trying Linux, but would like to see what it has to offer.