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Corel Linux to Access and Run Windows Apps
rawlink writes "Corel has announced that they are working w/ GraphOn to support their Bridges client software on Corel Linux. This will allow the Linux client to access Windows apps over a network connection, much the same way that Citrix does." I hope this won't be too expensive; it could instantly enlighten the minds of a lot of people wondering what the next OS for their LAN should be...
Note: This does _not_ mean that they won't use wine. This only means that they can run win32 apps _remeotely_.
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GroundAndPound.com
One of the main difficulties with windows apps over a network is that they have no concept of mutiple users and file permissions. For instance, the Normal.dot template in word must be writable by all users, usually resulting in some wonderful macro viruses. But my main problem is the price of Metaframe and the way that licensing is done. I believe we had to pay for NT workstation seat licenses for each connection, even though we are using the Sun clients. Bah
If you surf over to Citrix's Web Site you'll notice that there already is a linux client for this server.
Simply put, if you have a WinNT TSE (Terminal Server Edition) Server or a Windows 2000 Server you'll already have access to this with native Microsoft enhancements.
With thanks
Tenement
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Check this story (from November): According to this "Corel Corporation will use GraphOn's Bridges(TM) software to allow access to Windows applications from Corel's(R) Linux desktops." Does this mean Corel is dropping support of WINE? As someone else has stated before, this has nothing to do with wine: Bridges is only a sort of "X server for Windows", so one can display the output of a Windoze app runner on a Windoze box.
does anyone know what the performance is like on a 56k modem? Can this possibly substitute fir being able to run locally? This still doesn't sound like a real solution to the Windoze problem - so instead of your PCs crashing, you will have 25 instances on Word97 running on your NT server and it will go down. Big deal. I don't think there can be a mass migration of Windoze users to Linux until you can run your Win32 apps LOCALLY on your Linux machine, with the full realiability of Linux and feature set of the Win32 app. Do you want to have to dial up every time you use Word or Excel? I don't think so. Do you want to be the Network Admin in charge of an NT box running 200 instances of Word2000? I don't think so.
This product is not like VNC. It can remote display a single application running on a remote NT server on the local *nix desktop. But the remote app itself is never displayed on the remote server. This product isn't a "screen scraper" like VNC or PCAnywhere.
Even under single-user NT, it is a multi-user product, because screen and/or input device contention is not an issue.
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
It's always been possible to do this, thankfully someone has finally implemented it across different operating systems. This will certainly speed the adoption of Linux in business, as it will not require a complete reworking of a companys ADP strategy. A couple questions, will it only link to Windows NT Server? Will this work for different hardware, such as a Linux Alpha machine running software on a Windows NT x86 machine? Will it be Open Source?
The article talks about letting you run all your Windows applications seamlessly over the network.
Okay, that's a neat thing to say, but what can it actually _do_? With this stuff, can I run QuakeIII over the network and get it to work on my X display? What if I don't have MesaGL installed? How does it handle displaying data? Obviously it will run in X, but is it compatible with the XFree86 4.0 stuff that's coming out Real Soon Now?
I suspect that what this will eventually boil down to is another piece of VMware-ish. VMware uses custom kernel modules in order to provide all the neccesary hooks, and these modules have been known to cause all sorts of problems, both in causing actual faults to trying to tract them down.
Showing support for a company that goes for outrageously stupid patent things is hardly something I'd want to get excited about.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
If you don't remember Corel sold its jBridge technology to Graphon in exchange for 25% ownership a little over a year ago. This "Bridge" technology that will allow linux clients to run Windows applications is just an extension of what Corel started. I wouldn't think it would be too expensive, given Corel's share in this company and their vested interest in seeing Linux take off.
The problems with this technology is the licensing of the products. I delt with the Citrix problem bulit a system and then had to cancel the job based on the cost of the licenses (it was a large CAD program that caused the troubles). The idea is great and the technology works, the problem is the licenseing of the products. If Corel could dop something about that, like developeing licence servers for all Windows apps that would/could help. Until the legal aspects change this technology for Windows is very limited.
SOC/RO Update: Well it looks like Corel! has done it again. Following on the success of their earlier products, CorelDraw! Corel XARA!, and Corel Wordperfect Suite!, Corel! now has a new product: Corel Bridges! This revolutionary new product is positioned to bring Corel! into the proprietary operating system market with its Corel Linux! product, soon to be renamed Corel/OS! "How is this good for the Open/Source movement?" you ask. Simple, my dear, nothing is good for the Open/Source Movement! "But Macromedia is making Shockwave! Open/Source!" So what. What kind of world do we live in where companies are too lazy to write their own software. And then all the anonymous slaves that write it for them and get no money for it decide to revolt. This is always bad, in my opinion. Remember the slave revolts of the early 1800s?? Well get ready for the Great Open/Source Slave Revolt! of 2020. Oh man, are we in trouble. Flying cities will burn, hovercars will be overturned, and Smergfomzs will run wild in the streets. Oh, the humanity. And the humchuikity. President Fitkold from the planet Humchuiky will declare marshall law, and the national guard will patrol YOUR neighborhood wearing powered armor and driving fusion tanks. "President Fitkold, we have an incoming transmission." "A transmission? What is it?" "It is a set of different ratio gears arranged on a complicated mechanism to allow different torque/speed ratios for automobiles. But that is not important now. The Open/Source slaves wish to call on a truce -- on one condition." "One condition? What is it?" Well wouldn't you like to know. I suppose the point of all this is, in a weird sort of way, that we need to learn to respect others and ourselves if we are to ever truly get along with the Humchuikities. Let me give you an example. Suppose you have a box, with $3 and a dead cat named Belfry, and you put the $3 and the dead cat in the box. Now you bring this box to the supermarket in order to purchase toothpaste, but it costs $4.67. "Damn!" you say when you get to the checkout. "Will you just let me have the toothpaste?" you ask. "Umm.. No." says the cashier. "Well what if I give you a dead cat," you ask as you bring out the rotting, long-since lifeless body of Belfry. "Ok." she says as she joyfully takes the stinking carcass away from you, and begins jamming it in the cash drawer. You can hear the sound of bones cracking as she pounds on it trying to get it to fit. Then she begins slamming the drawer repeatedly in an effort to get it closed. But to no avail. "What's the hell is going on here?!" exclaims the manager. "I don't know, your cashier is having trouble fitting my dead cat named Belfry into the cash drawer." you explain helpfully. "Hmm.. Well let me see if I can help." The manager squeezes in past the cashier and helps her along out of the way as the exhausted cashier steps back and crosses her arms. "Fucking drawer!" the manager exlaims as he begins slamming the drawer harder and harder. Finally the dead cat named Belfry explodes. Well, it is about time.
While a very nice step, this only has implications for shops using NT or W95/98 right now for desktops, that are thinking about moving to Linux. I would like to see this personally, since I have to reboot my machine once a week to use a Windows accounting package (this would save me that, but then again WINE or VMWare would do as well).
Other than that - allowing application locked shops to move to a heterogeneous network - this announcement is no big deal (but I still like to see them 8-)
I think they'd start to suspect and look at you funny when everyone else is getting bluescreens 10x a day and you're just sitting there being all productive and stuff. If you're smart put the BSOD screensaver on that linux box.
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
Just some thoughts, and no real conclusion. I guess I'll stay here on the fence, and throw some more support/feedback to the WINE folks.
Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
I am the head network administrator for a DSP design house with three locations around the U.S. Right now, NT is our primary desktop OS. However, as our tools become available on Linux, our users are gradually asking for it. Right now about 10% of our end users dual boot Linux (one of them is running it exclusively). I'm personally excited to be in a position to help these pioneers along. Although our network is based on NT file, print, and authentication services (sorry, that predates my employment) we also have a NIS+ domain for our E450's and I've been tying the new Linux systems into that domain. The feedback has been excellent. Our users have a true "roaming desktop" under Linux. They can seemlessly tie into the filesystems in the Sun farm. Our VCS jobs run faster under the same hardware running Linux than on NT (a matter of HOURS faster). The next big push I'm sticking my neck out on is eliminating Microsoft Visual SourceSafe for source code control, and migrating to CVS. Most of the network is accessible from any OS but the source control system is still M$-only. Once that wall breaks down, we'll see more Linux on the desktop. And yes, it's ready. It runs WickedFast on our P3 machines (as opposed to "acceptable" for NT 4.0). Most of the apps we need run and run well on this platform. And it is a very graceful network neighbor that makes my job a lot easier.
Corel seems to be billing this as support for Windows applications under Linux. This isn't quite correct. They even go so far as to say it provides support for Windows applications with no additional hardware. That's blatantly incorrect. Not only do you need additional hardware, you need a whole PC! This is nothing more than a Windows Terminal Server solution. You have to have an existing Windows PC sitting around somewhere on your network and run the applications off it. GraphOn merely "exports" the display of those applications to the Linux client. Big whoop. This isn't the problem most people are interested in having solved.
Thomas Dorris
This would be great, and could spell the end to my use of VM-Ware... would much rather access the programs on the network than have that dsk image on my hd.
IMHO disk space is so cheap, it's almost a non-issue with vmware. I would much prefer vmware to remoted apps... running something remotely imposes some limits on what you can do. There aren't really any problems like this with VMWare, and when all the DRI stuff is done it should be almost as fast as running the apps in straight win95 with no virtual machine.
I also don't want to depend on some flaky NT machine being up so I can run my windows apps... hell, if VMware crashes, you just restart it.
Cute. Here we keep hearing about how maybe Linux is an OK server OS but Win* is the only choice of the desktop, and what happens? We get a big push towards using an NT server with Linux desktops!
Actually, we've been doing something similar to support legacy X apps (OK, X makes this much easier.) We have legacy servers sufficient for the workload, and the obsolete apps run on them transparently (the local jobs are just RJE scripts.) Given the gorking huge pile of legacy WinCode, this is something that corporate admins are going to need someday regardless.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Specifically, Corel is involved in WINE so they could easily port their apps to Linux. They are by all accounts almost done with this for their first round of apps (they recently split their tree from the WineHQ one so they could do beta testing without us all possibly breaking their stuff - we'll remerge once they ship :). They are even paying Wine's leader (Alexandre Julliard) money to fix Wine's last major architectural problem (only 1 address space for all processes) despite the fact that the problem doesn't directly affect their applications.
:)
(as an aside, the Wine team has seen interest from some other "name-brand" commercial software vendors about using WineLib to port their stuff now that Corel's done the hard part - we may have enough apps to conquer the desktop sooner than you think
As has been stated before, GraphOn's system has completely different goals and is more like WinFrame or VNC than Wine.
-Ian "wine-devel" Schmidt
We may need native apps. But the fact is, there's a lot of Windows apps that can't be just dropped. We need to be able to continue to support them. And Graphon is providing a way to do that.
-Brent*smack*
Click on a few links and find out what we're talking about. Then come back and share.
Thanks,
-BrentWhat a minute. Corel exists only to promote their product. What else did you expect them to do?
And this being a GraphOn press release don't you think they'd want to promote the fact they'll be supporting more then just one distribution?This was a joint press release between Graphon and Corel. I think all the important players were mentioned, don't you?
-BrentMicrosoft and Citrix are actually rivals in this thin-client technology. Citrix produced the ICA protocol, which was much better than the original RDP protocol Microsoft made for their Terminal Server product. However, Microsoft is due to take this market back with their new version of RDP. This means Citrix would be better moving into more diverse markets.
This is where it gets wierd. Citrix HAVE produced a Linux client, and some Linux roll-outs in the enterprise sector are actually based on this. But it's a really old version, and much more limited than the DOS/Win16/Win32 versions they have brought out. There are also web and java versions of the client, but Citrix are really shooting themselves in the foot by not paying more attention to this ripe market. Come on Citrix, update the client!!!
insignificant sig
...They are even paying Wine's leader (Alexandre Julliard) money to fix Wine's last major architectural problem (only 1 address space for all processes) despite the fact that the problem doesn't directly affect their applications.... we may have enough apps to conquer the desktop sooner than you think :)
This is great. There are a couple of windows apps that I find is very difficult to leave behind, like Eudora, Agent, and Lotus Organizer -- mostly because I'm a fuddy-duddy and used to them. The mo-better these work through WINE, the mo-closer I am to platform bliss. I have precisely -zero- desire to run these thru Graphon or VNC tools; I want 'em on my linux laptop. The only criticism I've had for the WINE dev crowd is that y'all need to publicise your achievements more -- but I see that the website is much more informative & friendly than it used to be.
J
I think not...(*poof*)
You don't need to go to lawschool to read this stuff; a decent command of English and logical reasoning is sufficient, and as an engineer, you better learn how to read and write patent claims.
So, unless you can run Windows and Linux simultaneously on your PC, you're out of luck.
:)
.. which you can do using VMWare (or the upcoming free clone).
Does this Bridges software just give you a whole Windows desktop in a window, or does it present each Windows-window in an X-window? If it does the latter, I can see a lot of benefit in running the Bridges server under VMware, and using the Linux Bridges client to interact with your Windows apps.
... until Wine is finished, at least
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