Lina: Run Linux aps on Windows or OS X, or at least one Linux app

It's been almost a year since we checked in on Lina, an attempt at creating a cross-platform solution for running Linux applications on pretty much any operating system. At the time, Lina was only available to a handful of folks. Now anyone can download and install Lina on a Windows, OS X, or Linux machine. But to be perfectly honest, we're not sure why anyone would at this point.

Lina definitely shows a lot of promise. It creates a system that will let you install and run custom binaries on any operating system. But right now there's a grand total of one custom binary available. And it's Nano, a simple text editor.

Meanwhile, several other projects have popped up over the last year that let you run Linux applications on Windows. There's andLinux which basically allows you to run a version of Ubuntu from within Windows, allowing you to run any application that can run on Ubuntu. And there's KDE for Windows, which lets you install and run a number of applications designed to run on the KDE desktop environment for Linux. Right now, you can run far more applications using either of these methods than you can with Lina. But we plan to keep checking up on Lina to see if the tool starts to live up to its promise in the future. Thanks to DailyApps for reminding us to check in on Lina's progress this time around.

Tags: andlinux, cross-platform, kde-for-windows, lina