project Cassowary develops toolkit, allowing you to work with running in a virtual machine or on another computer Windows programs as with native individual applications on desktop in Linux. Windows programs are started through a label in the Linux environment and open in separate windows, by analogy with regular Linux applications. The reference task is also supported – Linux programs can be called from the environment with Windows.
The project offers applications to configure a virtual machine with Windows and organizing a forwarding to the application windows. To start a virtual machine, use Virt-Manager and KVM, and to access the FreerDP program window. The graphical interface is provided to configure the environment and conveying the windows of individual applications.
The project code is written in Python (GUI based on pyqt5) and spreads under the GPLv2 license.
During the Windows program, you get access to files in the user’s home directory on the host system, and native Linux programs can access files in the Windows virtual machine.
Sharing files and drives between Windows in Linux is configured automatically, and is performed in accordance with certain access settings. In addition to the Windows-application virtual machines, you can run on external computers on which only Windows is installed (to work on such systems you need to install the Cassowary Agent application).
An interesting feature of Cassowary is the ability to automatically freeze the virtual machine with Windows when there are no running Windows programs so as not to spend resources and memory during inactivity. When you try to start a Windows application from Linux, the virtual machine is automatically restored.