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I'm not sure if the CD-R software would work but I've have a lot of success with win4lin when I need a piece of windows software run.

There are two big disadvantages. First, this software doesn't help run directx (or any 3d) games but that's what I use winex for. Secondly, it requries a windows license. Chances are that you have one - regardless of if you want to or not.

Sharing files is also much nicer than with vmware -- the C: drive is simply in ~/win and there's another drive mapped as ~/mydata, so you can just copy or symlink stuff you want there.

I installed it so I could run IE6 for some web development stuff, but it's run most other apps I've tried nicely as well (no directx, and only windows 95/98/ME are supported).

The special URL - http://www.netraverse.com/special.htm

I think there is an older version available as trial, if you google for win4lin evaulation.

check it out at our website: http://www.netraverse.com

check it out at our website: http://www.netraverse.com

check it out at our website: http://www.netraverse.com

One other thing to watch out for... I had become fairly lazy about scanning the desktop since incoming mail was virtually 100% clean and since nobody uses floppies any more. Then I had a user download an infected file from her personal webmail account. I went crazy trying to figure out how this thing got in until I finally got a confession on the webmail use.

I agree, we have an office full of NT workstations, and a linux firewall, fileserver/webserver(intranet), all problems we have with computers seem to be related to windows. Use LTSP with netraverse server to provide windows applications.

I don't know about Quickbooks Pro on Wine, but I use Quickbooks 2000 (non-Pro) on Win4Lin and it works fine. It also works for Internet Explorer, PWS, eFax, etc.

It seems to me that all we'll ever be able to run on Wine is old Windows applications. Any cutting edge applications will not run unless the said app. maintains strict adherence to a old proprietary standard. This means that Wine will always be one step back.

And don't forget that so far, we can't even run old Windows applications using Wine. We're how many years on and I still can't run MS Office 95 or 97 with the latest Wine release, much less Internet Explorer or Photoshop. The recent popularity of the "screw native Linux software, all we need is Wine" mentality is very troubling.

Incedently VMWare and Bochs are not new concepts. SCO have had something called Merge [caldera.com] for ages, which has allowed people to run Windows on Openserver for years now and more recently allowed Unixware users to do the same.

By the way, you can also get Merge for Linux. It's used as the guts of the very popular (and cheaper and faster than VMWare) Win4Lin.

I don't use WIndows for anything. If I absolutley need an app that is only available on WIndows, I use Win4Lin by Netraverse I haven't used Office in over 2 years. Actually, that's a lie..I actually used it to check how OpenOffice converted my resume into a .doc file. Came out fine. I'm not a gamer, so I guess that's why I could care about a windows partition. I DO triple boot. One machine on my network has Debian, FreeBSD and QNX on the same box. Have to get my QNX fix every now and then :)

Have you looked at Win4Lin? Win4Lin offers Windows 95 or 98 as an application on Linux, and the company that makes it (NeTraverse) also offers a thin-client multi-user solution (NeTraverse Server Standard Edition). You get the stability of Linux and the ability to use Windows apps as well.

Have you looked at Win4Lin? Win4Lin offers Windows 95 or 98 as an application on Linux, and the company that makes it (NeTraverse) also offers a thin-client multi-user solution (NeTraverse Server Standard Edition). You get the stability of Linux and the ability to use Windows apps as well.

I've installed some (ok, one) thin-client network with linux thin clients ( thinknic.com ) running Win4Lin on the server. Works good.
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I don't see the 'wine' approach ever becoming glitch-free enough to be useful. Try win4lin - it runs just about every useful windows app I need to run (office & quicken work perfectly). The only downside is you need to have a copy of windows 98. Btw win4lin is much faster than vmware.

I don't know about these, but I'm using win4lin here and it's rock solid. It mainly gets used for Dreamweaver and the occasional site that requires IE (urrgh). There's no reason at all why custom windows apps can't be run this way, and there's even a sister product to win4lin that runs on a high-end linux box, and is essentially a terminal server.

That kind of solution would allow linux desktops to be phased in whilst the custom software was recoded. There would be short-term expenses, but as part of a long term strategy of replacing MS software, probably quite practical.

I don't know about these, but I'm using win4lin here and it's rock solid. It mainly gets used for Dreamweaver and the occasional site that requires IE (urrgh). There's no reason at all why custom windows apps can't be run this way, and there's even a sister product to win4lin that runs on a high-end linux box, and is essentially a terminal server.

That kind of solution would allow linux desktops to be phased in whilst the custom software was recoded. There would be short-term expenses, but as part of a long term strategy of replacing MS software, probably quite practical.

I used to love my Linux laptop about 2 years ago, I felt so sophisticated. Tell you the truth I am running w2k on it now (A Sony Vaio), just wasn't worth the trouble. Then my box runs Linux (RH) and I do most of my java development on it, I am very happy with it.

I've been running Linux on my laptop for about a year now. Used to be Win98 but one day I just got sick of rebooting and reinstalling every 12-18 months. I'd been using Linux on all my servers and firewalls so I figured why not give it a try on the desktop?

I run Slackware 8.0 with XF4.1.0 with WindowMaker and KDE2.2.1 from CVS (I hack around on it a bit) -- the antialised fonts are great, the screen works perfectly, the video card, PCMCIA, sound and USB subsystems are all supported more or less flawlessly. I'm having issues with printing but I think I'm going to dump CUPS and try LPRng or something; I'm getting sick of fiddling with it.

I used to run Win4Lin daily to get the office aspects of my job done but now the only time I boot it is to run MPLAB, an IDE which drives the ICE I use in my embedded development. KOffice does 99% of my office needs and KMail/KNode work pretty damn good for POP3/IMAP and NNTP handlers. What Konqueror bungs up on Opera seems to take care of.

This laptop is about 3 or 4 years old now. It's a Hyperdata MediaGo 950AGP: Celeron 300, 256M RAM and a 10G drive. I get about 3 hours of battery life out of the thing, even watching DVDs (that was back in Windows when the ALI M3909 hardware MPEG2 decoder worked). If I'm doing heavy compiling then drop that time down about 40-50%. The notebook doesn't get overly warm in my lap and its sleep mode seems to be compatible with Linux for the most part. Hell, I take multiple-hour baths and surf the net/IRC with it (wireless card) -- I have one of those old wrought-iron claw-foot tubs which holds the heat forever and a 3/8" sheet of plywood goes across it to rest the notebook or any books and drinks I have. Yeah it's a little weird but it's a form of relaxation. :-)

So, at least for me, it hasn't been more hassle than its worth. Win98 was a hassle. Win2k won't work on this machine (the install freezes every time, Hyperdata support claims there is something not supported by Win2k). Linux has been a godsend for me. I've been offered notebook upgrades from work but I've really come to like this little one. I've even ordered plastic subassemblies a few times to repair cracks from overuse and misuse (I tend to pick it up by one corner and that strains one of the shell pieces).

aside: if anyone can find drivers or specs for the M3909 MPEG2 decoder I'd love to hear from you. I don't understand why they EOL a product and still refuse to give out data on it. A cel300 is a little weak for DVD/DivX decode so I'd at least like to try for half. Hell, this thing has an ATI Rage Mobility graphics chip in it; if ATI would release a Linux DVD player I'd be happy too!

Hey, I'm not calling you lame, even if my comments might have seemed dismissive of newbies. That isn't really what I meant. What's lame is the sort of close-minded post I was responding to. What I should have said is that /. provides a wonderful sort of cross-fertilization between worlds, if you're open to it. Even a troll like the one I was responding to can generate interesting exchanges which might point people in useful directions, which is the only reason I bother to respond.

As for running Linux: you definitely need to play with it to learn. Hard disks are so cheap these days, if you can't buy one, maybe you could get an old one from someone who's upgrading and add it to your machine. If you really want to avoid messing with your Windows config, install Linux on a 2nd drive and use your machine's BIOS to enable the drive you want to use and disable the other (or if you're really paranoid, unplug the unused drive's power). This isn't the "right" way to do it, but if you're worried that you might, say, trash Windows with a LILO install when you're getting started - not a completely baseless concern - then what I'm talking about eliminates that worry.

Although you didn't raise it directly, I think the question of "why use Linux", implicit to the whole issue of what's cool and what people's motivation is, is a very valid one. Linux isn't the answer for everyone, right now. I use it because I'm a developer, and because I hate the bugginess and lack of control I have under Windows. Having the source to everything, even if you only have a minimal clue about what to do with it, can be incredibly empowering. You may not always know what to do with the source, but someone else might.

For non-developers who want to learn, though, Windows presents the same basic problem - it's a prepackaged, minimally customizable solution. Microsoft goes out of its way to hide the innards from you and make it difficult to modify. If you're a granny or a flute player and all you want is to be able to email your buddies and surf a little, Windows isn't so bad. But if you want more than just a predigested, spoonfed solution, if you're curious about what's going on under the hood and want to learn about it, then Windows is an exercise in frustration.

Linux can be frustrating too, in a different way, but the payoff is a lot greater - real knowledge, rather than just learning non-transferrable superficialities about Microsoft's latest marketing-approved flavor-of-the-month.

BTW, if you manage to get Linux running, and get a little comfy with it, you might look into running it as your main install and running Windows in a virtual machine using something like Win4Lin. I do something similar myself - my main desktop environment used to be Windows NT, which I still need for work, but now my base environment is Linux. I actually use VMWare to run NT on Linux, not Win4Lin (which runs Win9x), but it's the same basic idea and should work just as well. I reboot my machine a lot less often since I switched.

I have gotten some games to run well using the win4linux application found here.

There's a trial version available, so you can test some games with it without buying it right away.

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Win4Lin is not slow, cumbersome, nor a resource hog. Get it and you'll forget how to reboot!

What IS annoying is that Mozilla is taking *huge* amounts of RAM and has pushed my system into using swap! Usually, I run Linux 2.2.16, KDE2, Citrix ICAClient (to access corporate Winframe server for email), Win4Lin with Windows 98SE (so I can run Internet Explorer -- needed for my web development work, sorry), apache + mod_perl + mason (for local testing) -- all this WITHOUT USING ANY SWAP! But, now I'm running Mozilla -- without Win4Lin or Windows 98SE or IE5.5 -- and I'm swapping like nuts.

I'd like to be able to run only Open Source products on my laptop, but I cannot as long as IE5.5 is the leading browser (not just in market share).

At least it's an admission that MSFT HASN'T... Don't boast -- do it.
Instead of speaking to lawmakers about the "dangers" of Open Source distroying innovation, innovate.

What model produced the Internet revolution? Open Source; Open Standards. Yes, Microsoft has produced a nice browser. Yes, Windows is convenient to use for most people (heck, right now I'm using IE5.5 on Win98SE running via Win4LIn on my SuSe/KDE2 desktop;why? because my development work for the web requires IE5.5...because Windows is ubiquitous). I and many other prefer choice -- sometimes that choice is Microsoft, believe it or not.

Open Source against Intellectual Property?
NO! Open Source is not against Intellectual Property! The GPL enforces the rights of the author -- even though the source is distributed, it must be handled according to the terms of the license -- that is Intellectual Property enforcement. Does not the author maintain the rights to his/her software under the GPL? Yes. The difference between closed source and open source is not intellectual property but full disclosure. What is running on my mission critical servers? -- with MSFT products God knows; with Open Source products, I know (or, at least, disinterested third parties can know, too; call it, peer review). I personally can trust Microsoft (and Lotus, etc) with the secretaries desktop machine. But not my business' servers. I didn't care about this issue until our SCO UNIX servers started having mystery crashes in the early 90's. Then our DEC Alpha servers began having mystery file corruption in 1997 -- and DEC engineers were summoned to fix the problem. Being a software company we had talent in house that could have made use of the source -- but SCO and DEC were closed source. We were at the mercy of their engineers. Then, in 1999, after we had been running Linux servers for 2.5 years for mission critical applications, we ran into a tty limitation. A quick look through the source revealed our problem unambigously -- and the problem was solved in days. That was an invaluable lesson and is the main reason we choose Open Source versus closed source tools.

It seems to me that innovation has continued to exponentiate since Open Source came into its own. Hey, Microsoft, you might even join us. There's room for you, too. Just, don't think you will be able to take over. Once the source is open, so are the choices.

Then, use Win4Lin, from Netraverse .

It's lighter and I've seen it run on a K6/2-400 with 64MB of RAM. This is not a fancy machine, but it was able to boot Win98, start MS-Power Point and give a presentation at our LUG meeting point.

They use some kind of modules to give a protected-thread access to the CPU. This is way it runs so fast in slower machines. Also it's not as memory-hungry as vmware.

I was trully impressed.

If only it was easier to install, at least in my Mandrake...

Regards,
opkool

But...

If you're not running Linux, you should be able to build Wine on your platform. As far as I know, Wine will properly do international fonts & formatting if the copy of Windows installed on the box is configured properly.

...WHAT hardware is running VMWare. It is DOG slow. Now, if only Win4Lin could do DirectX :)

>:^D

It appears that this integration could be done in Win4Lin as well, by an install proceedure which set up Windows to boot from a Linux filesystem, replacing winsock.dll and wsock32.dll, and other portions of Windows as needed to do the job.

Is anyone working on such integration features, and if not, would you be interested in people contributing Windows drivers for that purpose?

I just got the 2.2.18 kernel - quite nice. The Win4Lin kernel patches for 2.2.17 apply just fine, and apparently my USB scanner (UMAX Astra 1220U) is supported by the USB drivers.

However, apparently the sane backend doesn't support the scanner. Does anyone have any tips/ideas/etc. on getting the Astra 1220U working?

The thing that Mr. Petreley doesn't seem to realise, is that it is possible to find out what it is in Windows (not nearly impossible as he claims). True, decompiling Windows binaries is a nuisance. On the other hand, there are a lot of people out there blindly downloading RPMs, gleefully chuckling to themselves how cool they are for outwitting the evil Microsoft. What trustworthy soul do they think has checked the source for them? Linus? Tux?

My favourite part:

Windows seems to run faster than it does natively, although I have no idea how that would be possible

Methinks Microsoft's ex-janitor's drunken ravings at the local bar about RADIUS, telnet servers and VPNs being stolen from Linux aren't quite the big story Nick thought.
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Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

What's more, I receive tons of spam from Vmware, so they definitely DO NOT deserve my money. Long live Free software !

I bought Win4Lin instead, and I'm really impressed with it, it runs at nearly the original speed! As what most people want is a way to use the few Windows applications they have to run everyday, it's just great. If a couple of guys pretend they have to run Netware, WinNt and Win98 on the same machine at snail pace, that's fine for them, but as I have no masochistic tendencies, I will keep using the fastest solution.

And as someone said : Buy Win4LinThey deserve your dollars, and you deserve their fabulous piece of software ! ;>

What's more, I receive tons of spam from Vmware, so they definitely DO NOT deserve my money. Long live Free software !

I bought Win4Lin instead, and I'm really impressed with it, it runs at nearly the original speed! As what most people want is a way to use the few Windows applications they have to run everyday, it's just great. If a couple of guys pretend they have to run Netware, WinNt and Win98 on the same machine at snail pace, that's fine for them, but as I have no masochistic tendencies, I will keep using the fastest solution.

And as someone said : Buy Win4LinThey deserve your dollars, and you deserve their fabulous piece of software ! ;>