Xandros Presto: A Quick-Booting Linux Partition for Your Windows

Windows-Only: Presenting Xandros Presto – – in Five Screenshots.
How long does it take you to boot your Windows Vista? Being such a resource hog, a 1Gb RAM Vista laptop can take you up to several minutes to boot up. That’s why Xandros thought of “Instant-On” Presto.

Xandros Presto like the name says, is a light-weight, quick-boot Linux operating system that installs from inside Windows, a Xandros-based partition that boots up in just a few seconds. It permits you to run two operating systems on your PC; a fast-boot, but limited Linux and a slow boot, but full-fleshed Windows.

On the fly computing is at it’s best with Xandros Presto. It took me less than 18 seconds, on my old laptop, from boot time to navigating with Firefox 3.0.8 and took less than 8 seconds to shut down.

Presto, out-of-the-box reads your Windows partition with all it’s multimedia files. You can immediately create documents with OpenOffice.org 3.0 or make calls with Skype 2 for Linux or chat with Pidgin. It also includes a pre-installed RealPlayer and plugins for multimedia. You can extend your collection of applications from the Presto Application Store. I smoothly installed Gimp Image Editor.

For more configuration, press Ctrl-Alt-T to bring up the terminal, or Alt+F2 to bring up “Run Application”: type-in xfce4-settings-manager. You’re now set to tweaking your Presto “Settings”.

Presto “instant-on” comes with the Xfce 4.6 Desktop Environment and the light Thunar file manager.
Presto is available to purchase for $19.95 USD but you can download try it for 7 days.
[Screenshots]
[nggallery id=7]
Download Xandros Presto –version 1.0