Windows-On-Linux Emulator Shootout

securitas writes: "ZDNet has posted a comparative review of 5 Windows-on-Linux emulators from VMware (2), NeTraverse, WinToNet and Wine." The results encountered varied quite a bit -- none of the products are perfect, but it looks like they hit a particularly disappointing time with Wine.

Comments

Moral of this story:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have the funds, buy two computers and a switchbox. If you don't have the funds, configure your machine to dual boot.

Really, what's the point of running the emulation if you lose speed and capabilities?

Re:Moral of this story:

[sys$manager]

I use VMWare because I write books and it's far more convienient to have a given operating system on which I'm writing in a window than dual booting or even using a switch box.

Re:Moral of this story:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be simpler to just do all your work on a single platform, in that case? Windows if you need Word, or Linux if you need (I dunno) vi?

Re:Moral of this story:

[Adnans]

Really, what's the point of running the emulation if you lose speed and capabilities?

The point is that you get to run another OS while still having access to your regular OS. I can keep my development enviroment and monitoring tools up and running in Linux, while booting Win2000 in VMware and browse that one webpage that requires a plugin that's not available in Linux (yet). And if you fullscreen Vmware you will NOT notice that you're running inside Vmware since it's feels as fast as the real thing (granted: 1.33GHZ + 512MB DDR :). Oh, and if it ever crashes you just double click that vmware icon and Win2000 is up an running again in 20 seconds :-)

If you need to ask why, it's probably not for you anyway....

-adnans

Re:Moral of this story:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need to ask why, it's probably not for you anyway

I think that's the issue. If I need to use Windows, I have Windows. If I need to use Linux, I'll have Linux. Once inside Linux, though, I don't find any need to switch back out to Windows.

Maybe to play games? Is the driver support under emulation well done?

Re:Moral of this story:

[skt]

Or how about buying two computers, two NICs, and a crossover cable and just telnet to the other one? I'll let you guess which OS you'll be telneting to :) This way you don't have to leave your primary OS to access the other one.

Re:Moral of this story:

[cube farmer]

what's the point of running the emulation if you lose speed and capabilities?

I use VMWare to emulate Windows NT and 9x under Linux so that I can do web development in Linux, reconfigure Apache and MySQL on the fly, and still test my work in the most common browsing environments without having to own a second machine or worry about losing my 'net connection to an off-site box. Would a second or third machine be better? Sometimes. But not when my desk space and/or budget are limited.

(Actually, I only do it this way at work; at home I have four boxes for doing the same thing and much prefer that arrangement. But my employer is too cheap to give me a second, let alone third, box for testing purposes.)

Re:Moral of this story:

[Anonymous Coward]

vi (vim) runs on Windows

Re:Moral of this story:

[Rambo]

Well, let's see... The reason I run VMWare (which I've been using since it first beta-tested a couple years ago) is because I need a particular FPGA design package, and I like to be able to use my normal editor for developement with it (using it on a SAMBA share). That, and I can perform all my "normal" activities like surfing the web, email, etc, without having to reboot each time. I could of course use windows for some of these things, but then I'd end up with a situation where mailboxes weren't in sync, and I'd be forced to use some other editor. --Besides the simple fact I hate the windows environment.

Re:Moral of this story:

[GrandCow]

Exactly...

Right from the article itself:

Don't forget the obvious: For everything but Wine (and possibly also for Wine right now), you'll need a copy of Windows itself and copies of any applications you might want to run

This means that you wont get away from paying the "Microsoft tax." If you've gotta buy it in the first place just install it normally and boot into it when you need it.

-C

Re:Moral of this story:

[Mr. Foogle]

I'm looking into it .. we have 3 (count 'em three) ver important gotta have it applications that do not support linux, but do work well under Solaris AND NT.

My boss doesn't want to pay 20k for a solaris box, and he doesn't want to deal with the hassle that windows has become - Linux (or *BSD, I'm agnostic) will do the job.

From the Linux box, (still in beta in my work shop) they can emulate the windows apps. They *should* be able to X into Solaris and the Solaris apps.

But it is a kludge.

Re:Moral of this story:

[Andrewkov]

From the article:

VMware GSX Server is an enterprise-level product and is priced accordingly. The electronic distribution, which can be downloaded from VMware's Web site, costs $2,499, and a packaged version including documentation costs about $50 more. VMware's Workstation product, designed for individual users, is available for $299 and offers much of the same functionality

At those prices I think it would be cheaper to buy a second low-end machine.

Re:Moral of this story:

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this question is directly applicable to the topic at hand. If all your software runs on a single system without the need for an emulator, why switch.

Please mod this one back up.

Re:Moral of this story:

[cube farmer]

At those prices I think it would be cheaper to buy a second low-end machine.

I'm using version 2.0.2 from their earlier product line: $99, runs Win9x, NT, or 3.x.

Re:Moral of this story:

[DrgnDancer]

The Enterprize level product is just that. It's a VM manager for a (I assume) VERY powerful server. Get an eight or sixteen way box a few 32 gigs of RAM or so, and I bet you could serve many copies of any of several OS's to some low end clients that are basically just dumb terminals. Do all your managment from one place. Upgrade Office once, and everybody has the latest version. I don't know that to many businesses would be interested, but I can see some advantages.

Re:Moral of this story:

[Brigadier]

I disagree teh most useful scenerio I think is ina help desk env. whereI used to work you ha dot support win98/nt/macos each time we would have to run to a different station to simulate the client problem. what I ended up using was vnc to view my mac but it still required purchasing other machines.

Re:Moral of this story:

[oingoboingo]

I'll let you guess which OS you'll be telneting to :)

Windows 2000? It comes with a telnet server too.

Re:Moral of this story:

[dhogaza]

I do roughly the same thing, though it tends to be Oracle rather than MySQL.

I like to work in local coffee shops on my laptop.
Carrying around two laptops and the cable to connect them would be a drag. VMWare lets me do it all on one box, though testing MSIE under VMWare while running piggish Oracle under Linux requires a fair amount of memory (256MB works OK).

Re:Moral of this story:

[Anonymous Coward]

3D support lacks very hard in these emulators. Iv'e heard of people playing Hlaflife in wine, but doubt serriously its stability.. YMMV, of course.

Re:Moral of this story:

[Andrewkov]

I don't understand, how could you upgrade all the users PC's with upgrades for Office? Why not install PC Anywhere or Netmeeting on those PC's?

Re:Moral of this story:

[VertigoAce]

Given the choice of OS's to telnet to, I'd choose Linux. Linux is maintains much of its usefulness through the command line interface. Many of the reasons that you'd want to be emulating Windows involve having a GUI.

-Sean

Re:Moral of this story:

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Tax is strictly people that don't want to use Microsoft's schtuff but are forced to pay it because of OEM deals. It's not for when you use the product but just don't want to pay for it.

Re:Moral of this story:

[Anonymous Coward]

Once inside Linux, though, I don't find any need to switch back out to Windows.

That's because you are not surfing the WWW as much as us mere mortals, or you somehow miraculously found a creashless netscape/mozilla.

Re:Moral of this story:

[gimpboy]

have you tried LaTeX? the output is quite beautiful, and it has alot of functionality that makes the writing of books very easy. if you have any questions let me know if i can help.

Re:Moral of this story:

[sys$manager]

Not when it's a beta that gets reinstalled often, like Windows .NET Server in my particular case.

Re:Moral of this story:

[sys$manager]

Would be nice if the publisher accepted anything but MS Word.

Re:Moral of this story:

[gimpboy]

he wont even take postscript? i would think that most publishers would be happy to get a .tex document.

that really sucks though. i used to write my reports in word. after they got to about 40-50 pages with graphs and other images word would start to crash and stuff. i really cannot imagine writing a book with it.

Re:Moral of this story:

[DrgnDancer]

The user PCs would not actually have anything on them. VmWare runs in X, right? So you setup a large sever able to serve say 24 Windows Virtual Machines (from the article that would require a 6 processor machine, but to ensure good performance, we'll say an eight CPU machine with 16 gigabytes of RAM). Then you setup 24 machines of extremely low power, say Pentium 133s with 16 MB pf RAM, and no hard drive (Maybe a really small one for swap space, but I doubt you'd need it) or really anything except a video card (a decent one for good screen resolution), a NIC, and a CDROM. Make a bootable CDROM with nothing but a Linux install that automatically boots into X, and then opens a Windows VM full screen window from the server. Presto, 24 machines that are all "dumb terminals", but all have a nice familiar Windows interface your users are used to. You can manage everything from the server and the underlying OS. Since the server does all the work of running the OS and software, you can use whatever crap you want for the client machines, as long as they are powerful enough to run a Linux kernal, and X in 1024X768 (with no Window Manager, and only a single "window" open.)

Need to upgrade Office? Do it for each copy of the VM from your desk (or maybe right a script that'll do all of them at once). Same with OS upgrades. User hosed the system? No Problem, copy the data onto some temp space on the underlying server, wipe the VM and make a new one (again this could probably be automated from the underlying OS). Somebody wants to try Linux/BSD/"The latest version of Windows TM", but you don't want to risk your production systems? Install an extra VM for them to play with, and if it doesn't work out, wipe it.

This would, of course, be somewhat more expensive than buying 24 "normal" machines and a server for data and such, but I don't think it would be ALOT more expensive, and it would have some advantages. Like I said before, I don't know how many bussinesses would intersted in something like this, but it is an interesting idea. (Actually it'd make a great setup for a lab, or Internet cafe, where you can't trust the users not to abuse your OS.)

Re:Moral of this story:

[Andrewkov]

There are some obvious problems with this.. Single point of failure, for one ... If one instance of Windows crashes, how easy is it to re-install without affecting the other users? If it is possible, the server would probably slow to a crawl during the install. Also, one server can only support a limited amount of workstations, since each server is running a complete Windows OS and applications in sepeperate VMWare partitions. You are still required to buy licenses for each instance of Windows and Office that is running, so you are only saving money on hardware (and support costs, I suppose). Thirdly, how stable is VMWare? Can it really do this realistically? (I've never used it). Also, can all those VMWare instances share the same Ethernet connection?

Re:Moral of this story:

[DrgnDancer]

There are some obvious problems with this.. Single point of failure, for one

Yes, That is a signifigant problem, redundent servers of this type would get very expensive. It was one I had noted, but was ignoring, since hardware of the type I was talking about rarely fails (at least in my experience)

If one instance of Windows crashes, how easy is it to re-install without affecting the other users? If it is possible, the server would probably slow to a crawl during the install.

I don't think it would slow things much at all. The Windows reinstall would be happening in the same virtual "sandbox" that Windows itself runs in. It's resources are by definition controlled.

Also, one server can only support a limited amount of workstations, since each server is running a complete Windows OS and applications in sepeperate VMWare partitions.

Hence the reason for the eight way 16-32 gig machine as a server (with beau coup hard drive space obviously) By the time all is said and done, each of the workstations in my example ought to be getting about a PII 300 with 128 MB of RAM worth of computer, reasonable, if not generous.

You are still required to buy licenses for each instance of Windows and Office that is running, so you are only saving money on hardware (and support costs, I suppose).

I never said this was a cheap option. In fact I stated it would be more expensive than a similar setup with "real" computers and a more moderate server for shared data and such. I just said it would have some administrative advantages. That and a bit of gee whiz value. I think support costs might (note I say might) save you money in the long run, but I have no numbers to validate this.

Thirdly, how stable is VMWare? Can it really do this realistically? (I've never used it). Also, can all those VMWare instances share the same Ethernet connection?

No idea actually. I'm buying VMWare's marketing for the sake of arguement. I think you'd want at least a gigabit ethernet card on the server Maybe more than one. But I still say that if VM's claims are true, this is a doable idea. I will admit (again) to it's somewhat limited practicle application. I really think that in a classroom lab, internet cafe, or even a limited Kisok situation, this could be useful. In all those instances you are dealing with a situation where ease of maitaince is a greater concern than power, and your users are likely to be even more abusive of the software than most of us are used to.

Re:Moral of this story:

[forgeeks]

I've play Counter-Strike under Mandrake Linux using Wine. It works just fine.

Re:Moral of this story:

[Andrewkov]

Very interesting! Thanks for replying.

Re:Moral of this story:

[Anonymous Coward]

Realistically, you wouldn't want to load a CD-ROM to boot. You could simply burn the local mini-OS image into ROM and boot from firmware. No moving parts makes it quite durable and since they aren't that complicated they can be mass produced at a fairly low cost.

well

[mackga]

can anyone tell me why in the world with a -14 karma i'm posting at 0? i find this disturbing and discriminatory in the most egregious case. can i sue?

Re:well

[mackga]

perhaps a grand conspiracy to get rid of the magnificent /. trolls? if so, there will be blood spilt and heads will roll. i have friends who will kill for a plugged nickel and laugh all the way to the bar :)

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

If Windows sucks so much, why do you guys keep trying to get it to run on Linux?

Re:Hmmm

[Danse]

Cause some apps only run on Windows and some people have to have Windows for work purposes. Oh yeah... and for games.

Re:Hmmm

[DankNinja]

Because most software is written for shitty operating systems that you retards can use.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry dude, there isn't that much software written for Linux.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Wham! Game over. Nicely done.

WINE Is Not an Emulator!

[Anonymous Coward]

While it is clearly brought up that Wine is not an emulator, even just mixing it into the group of emulators is somewhat misleading...

Re:WINE Is Not an Emulator!

[Unknown Bovine Group]

Well it's not truly an apples-to-apples comparison but for users from a functional standpoint, the difference is minimal.

Why would I run a Windows emulator?
To run the win32 app I need.

Why would I run WINE?
To run the win32 app I need.

Of course there are other reasons to use emulators (testing/development environments come to mind) but it seems that it's better to see WINE in reviews than NOT see it, eh?

No wonder

[morbid]

WINE is an independently developed set of libraries and stuff that attempt to run Windows binaries on Linux and provide libraries to assist in the porting of Windows binaries to Linux. No wonder it's not as good (yet) and running a "proper" copy of windows inside what is essentially a PC emulator (or virtualiser).
They're not comparing apples with apples as usual.
Mind you, this is ZD net we're talking about...

Re:No wonder

[MrBlack]

My thoughts exactly. Although all the products achieve the same aim, they all do it in different ways, and all have their uses. VMWare is useful for testing lots of different windows configurations on one box, running windows and linux etc, but it is fundamentally different to WINE, which is useful if you want to run a single windows app without paying for a windows license, or without having to re-boot. Win2Net sound like some kind of proxy-in-a-browser or X-for-windows-in-a-browser thing, which is yet another sort of beast altogether (and probably not a bad solution in a number of cases - I remeber reading in a recent /. article by roblimo were public servants in some city in florida were using some sort of software like this to access MS-Excel via terminal-emulation). All three approaces are different, with pros and cons for each.

WINE.

[nihilvt]

WINE: WINE is not an emulator.

Win2Net but not Citrix Metaframe?

[sporri]

Strange to include win2net but not VNC and Metaframe which to me seem to do the same. (and do much better job at it)

And then the left the obvious out. How you can run linux programs on windows with something as sipmle as a terminal emulator or a X server

Re:Win2Net but not Citrix Metaframe?

[Splork]

rate that up!

they review Win2Net and complain about Sticker shock, but don't even look at VNC.

Win2Net might intercept calls at the win32 API layer instead of doing compressed differential screen shots like VNC (might not, i have no idea), but try it, the performance will not be much different.

VNC is free. No sticker shock there.

Re:Win2Net but not Citrix Metaframe?

[b0bby]

I use VNC all the time & love it, but a screen scraper app is different from one which can allow multiple simultaneous sessions. Only one VNC user can control the Windows desktop at a time. I agree that it's funny they overlooked Metaframe though.

Re:Win2Net but not Citrix Metaframe?

[Unknown Bovine Group]

VNC's one desktop is a limitation based on the fact that Windows does not have built-in support for running multiple concurrent sessions. If you run VNC on Linux you can get as many simultaneous sessions as you can handle.

Tried Win4Lin and VMware... VMware won.

[aussersterne]

I tried both Win4Lin and VMware, wanting to do two things: 1) sync my Windows CE device and install software to it from Linux and 2) run VirtualDub (except capture mode) under Linux.

I bought both Win4Lin and VMware Workstation and gave them a try. Win4Lin 3.0 was a nightmare to install -- on a stock RedHat 7.1 box -- and the tech support at Netraverse was less than helpful, even perhaps a little rude. I finally gave up on the GUI installer and dug through the RPMs until I cobbled together my own installation using their undocumented command-line tools. Using Windows 98 SE, Win4Lin is fairly fast and seamless, but some of the windows updates didn't install correctly (among them Internet Explorer 5.5) and VirtualDub did not run at all (I guess it uses DirectX).

VMWare installed easily, though it's a little more clumsy just to use. Once I had Windows running on it, it took VirtualDub and ActiveSync with no problem. Unfortunately, it's slower than Win4Lin in general and the way it "captures" the mouse cursor in X drives me nuts (yes, I have tools installed, but I still have to hit CTRL-ALT-ESC if a dialog box from another app pops up over the VMWare window). In the end, though, VMware seemed like the more solid product with better support, and it ran the apps I needed as well as all Windows updates (including IE 5.5 and DirectX 8).

Yes, I did try Wine for both things, but Wine is such a poorly documented mess at this point... I mean, there are rumors of people getting many things to run correctly, but just try tracking the knowledge down. When you do find it on something like Google groups, the details and DLL/registry fun needed to get specific apps to work with Wine is insane. I think at this point Wine is just a development platform (ala what Corel did with WordPerfect Office for Linux) because it sure isn't useful for anything else (but solitaire).

Re:Tried Win4Lin and VMware... VMware won.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that Wine allows me to run Lotus Notes at work and thus I am able to run Linux.

OK, but which one?

[Rick the Red]

This is a nice look at five options, but there are no conclusions -- no "Editor's Choice".

I have a real-world problem and I was hoping this article had a possible solution. I want to move my home PCs to Linux where possible, but my 5 year old has lots of Windows games. I recognize that these reviews are targeted to corporations trying to save bucks by using Linux, and for them the bottom line is Word and Excel, but for the majority of /.ers I'd guess the bottom line is games. This series was thin on games, other than to mention that Win4Lin doesn't do DirectX and VMWare is slow.

I'm not talking about Monster Truck Madness, I'm talking about Freddie Fish and Winnie the Pooh and Reader Rabbit. How do those fare under these emulators? I'm ready to dig into the configuration settings, create shell scripts, or whatever, so that he never knows he's on Linux -- he logs on and the emulator presents him Windows in full-screen -- but which emulator? Looks like none of them is up to it on our modest (400 MHz Duron) hardware.

Which leads me to the next question (but since this is the first post I doubt many will see, let alone answer): What's the best free/open X Terminal for Windows? If I have to run Windows then at least give me a reasonable way to reach Linux on another box (VNC is nice but the lag time hurts).

Another option is to run Windows and use VMWare to run Linux. This seems like the backward approach, but it could work. Has anyone tried it? Is it worth the trouble, or would dual-boot be better? (it's certainly cheaper, but reboots are annoyingly slow).

The ultimate solution would be to get Linux apps for my boy. Is there any educational/entertainment Linux software for kids? (commercial is OK, I'm not opposed to buying my software).

Thanks to all who answer

Re:OK, but which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pop for the $600 and get yourself a e-Machine. Put all your kid's software on there and not bother yourself with configurating (that's what a configurator does, right?) an emulator. Stop in at the Home Depot or Ikea to make a small kid-size desk and set them up there. They can work just like Daddy (only less cynical and bitter :-)!

Re:OK, but which one?

[jred]

Well, try them :) Really, I'd say you'd have the best luck w/ VMWare on Linux, and win98. As long as you have the ram (& it's cheap now) it should be ok. I suspect there will be poorer performance if you run linux on windows, though.

As for your Xterminal question, let me know :) I just installed cygwin, and it's supposed to be able to run xfree86, but I haven't gotten that far yet. Rocks as a ssh/scp/sftp client, though.

Re:OK, but which one?

[aboyko]

> What's the best free/open X Terminal for Windows? If I have to run Windows then at least give me a reasonable way to reach Linux on another box (VNC is nice but the lag time hurts).

Well, XFree86 runs under Cygwin (see http://www.cygwin.com/xfree/). But if you've got lag problems under VNC, I reckon X might not make things better...

Re:OK, but which one?

[batkiwi]

Considering that vmware is 300$, I doubt they even care about your typical linux enthousiast who wants to play some windows games. You could ALMOST buy a good cheap game playing box for that 300$ nowadays.

I work doing integrations, and would almost not be able to work without VMWare. We have gigs and gigs of vm's here, already set up. You can use it almost like a quick ghost, only you can have 2, 3, 4 on 1 machine, and don't have to blow away the base machine.

Plus if one goes down, just do like someone said earlier, doubleclick the .vmx and restart it.

If I need to do testing with version x of our product and version y of another product with theirs on linux and ours on winnt4 SP4, it's no problem. Just load up the vms, change the configs, and test away.

Buying copies of VMWare for game playing or to run Office is just rediculous! Talk about wrong tool for the wrong job...

Re:OK, but which one?

[ebh]

I don't dare let my kid TOUCH my "real" machines, much less actually use them. They're not even on the same floor of the house.

He has his own P133 Windows box that does Reader Rabbit et al just fine, and when (not if) he destroys it, we won't lose anything critical. When it's dead, we'll replace it with another similarly equipped junkpile cast-off.

Re:OK, but which one?

[greenfly]

Which leads me to the next question (but since this is the first post I doubt many will see, let alone answer): What's the best free/open X Terminal for Windows? If I have to run Windows then at least give me a reasonable way to reach Linux on another box (VNC is nice but the lag time hurts).

Have you ever tried the XFree86 Windows port from Cygwin? I've used it in the past to get a remote X login on windows 9x and 2000 machines I had to use at the time. And, yes, it's free.

Re:OK, but which one?

[mcelli]

I don't dare let my kid TOUCH my "real" machines, much less actually use them

Do you leave him in the car when you go shopping too? Or do you carry him around on a leash and tell him to shut up when he's thirsty and wants some water?

Seriously, embrace his curiousity. This is the only way computers can help children learn, not some bullshit rabbit telling them how to read. If he breaks it, fix it, it's not like it's hard to fix a computer. Who cares if you can't play Half life for an hour out of your day.

In my experience, the one thing that kids always know is when someone is being condescending towards them. Giving them their own junkpile cast-off computer is condescending.

Re:OK, but which one?

[Andrewkov]

It's illegal to leave a kid unattented in a car in some areas, especially in the summer.. They can die from the heat.

Anyway, if I had kids, I would give them their own Windows 98 or ME machine which they can learn with. I don't know how old your kids are, but I would have nightmares of them sticking a peanut-butter and jam sandwhich in the CD ROM drive. Sheesh, I barely let my wife use my main computer (the best thing about Windows 2000: Restricted Users!)

Re:OK, but which one?

[Xerithane]

I don't agree with a lot of what you say, but I agree with your general idea. I think it's important that kids do have usable hardware but as a developer in both home and office I don't want other people on my 3 major development boxes (one server, one workstation, one laptop). Regardless of their age.

I just dont like to take risks, I think that was his major point and unfortunately most people dont have money to buy bleeding edge computers for the youngsters so they get last weeks hardware.

Re:OK, but which one?

[vovin]

For an X server (I've not tried the cygwin XFree port, the OS/2 one isn't seamless ...) but on OS/2 I prefer HOBlink. They make an Windows version as well, and judging by the OS/2 one I suspect the windows one is also very nice.

http://www.hobsoft.com/products/x11/x11.html
http://www.hoblink.de

Re:OK, but which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had kids, it would mean that you had sex, or adopted. An adaption agency would sooner adopt to Michael Jackson than you, so stop living in your fantasy world and accept it that you'll never get laid.

Re:OK, but which one?

[quinto2000]

Our school uses X Win 32. This is quite a capable and compact x windows server. It is a commercial product, but by far the best I have found.

there are several projects to create kid-friendly linux software. a good place to start would be the Debian Jr. project, which aims to create an entire distribution. There are also some simple educational games around, like Tux Typer.

Re:OK, but which one?

[Andrewkov]

If you had kids, it would mean that you had sex, or adopted. An adaption agency would sooner adopt to Michael Jackson than you, so stop living in your fantasy world and accept it that you'll never get laid.

Maybe you missed the part of my post where I mentioned I'm married??
(Of course, that's no gaurantee of sex either)

Re:OK, but which one?

[Jeffster98]

You have a good reason to use Windows, so just use it; don't make your poor son suffer just because you have a personal problem with it. Yours is a perfect application for dual booting because you simply have no need to run two OS's at the same time (unless you also have an uptime fetish). I vote for the dual boot option as a few minutes for reboots won't kill you; after all, dual booting is the best option for your son's needs.

Re:OK, but which one?

[modecx]

If you want to embrace his curiosity so much, give him a 396, a slackware disc, a dark room, lots of books on the good old fun stuff (asm, C, etc.), and some strong coffe. When hee's old enough (say 5 or 6?) get him his own beer fridge, and a few cartons of cigs, and a new computer. Teach 'em to 1337 young, my dad always said.

*Disclaimer: If you can't tell that I'm kidding, you really need to get a life. On a more serrious note, sonny (or missy, -go geek chix!) shouldn't need the most up to date machine to learn to be competant with computers, or increace their other skills. I agree, however, that they should be kept up to date with what they will be using in school, as they will be more familiar with it. BTW, a similar junkpile cast-off is working really swell as a router/email/www/ftp server for me right now. Handing a kid a 1Ghz plus computer for playing typing tutor, or whatever the hell kids use nowadays is serrious overkill, IMO.

Re:OK, but which one?

[corky6921]

"I'm ready to dig into the configuration settings, create shell scripts, or whatever, so that he never knows he's on Linux -- he logs on and the emulator presents him Windows in full-screen -- but which emulator? Looks like none of them is up to it on our modest (400 MHz Duron) hardware."

Seize the opportunity! "Honey, our son really needs his own computer. Why don't we just give him our old one? I can buy that new 1GHz Dell that's marked down to only $800...!"

Re:OK, but which one?

[Ridiculator]

Buying copies of VMWare for game playing or to run Office is just rediculous!

And spelling it that way is just ridiculous. Really.

Re:OK, but which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

What hardware? There is no such thing as 400MHz Duron, 600MHz was the first and slowest sold and these things cannot even be "underclocked" to anything less than 500MHz.

Re:OK, but which one?

[Ed Avis]

WTF? There's a guy called 'Ridiculator' whose sole purpose is to correct the spelling of 'ridiculous'? Only on Slashdot...

Re:OK, but which one?

[hvoss]

Buying copies of VMWare for game playing or to run Office is just rediculous! Talk about wrong tool for the wrong job...

I disagree. There is also the VMWare Express version, which sells for only $79. I actually bought the Workstation version back when they sold it single user for $99. I currently use it on my laptop (192MB RAM) which is dual boot. I use it to run my Windows2000 partion under Linux or my Linux partition under Windows 2000. This works quite well. Performance is acceptable (probably because I use a physical disk instead of a virtual one).

I use it so I can read my Exchange / Outlook E-mail (corporate, because corporate IT doesn't want to allow SMTP/POP/IMAP on Exchange.)

Or (when I run Windows) I use it to stay in touch with a sane OS every now and then.

Re:OK, but which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

From my experience, VMWare is the way to go. My home PC is an 266MHz K6 w/ 64MB RAM running RedHat 6.2. I set up a separate user with an .xsession that just fires up VMWare (no window manager) with a Win98 VM configured to go to full screen mode on powerup, and it runs with almost native speed. I originally set it up to do our taxes with Turbo Tax. I would bet VMWare Lite (the Win95/98 only version) perform about the same.

Re:OK, but which one?

[ebh]

He's TWO. His curiosity right now is limited to how when he moves that white thing with the tail, the little arrow moves too, and how an A on the screen might just be the same thing as the A on his chalkboard. If he was bored with it, we wouldn't have to limit him to an hour a day, because he'd quit before that.

He doesn't know condescension from condensation, and too bad if he does. I give him his milk in a spill proof plastic cup, and he doesn't touch the Waterford stemware.

Nobody cares if I can't play Half Life/Quake/Doom/WWF Bitchslap, not even me. But I do care if I have to sit up all night rebuilding and restoring disks full of business-critical data.

And when he gets old enough that he can go beyond Reader Rabbit and has outgrown his junker machine, I'll get him a new one with capabilities appropriate for him. He's STILL not going to touch my main machines.

We're the parents, he's the child, and a healthy and happy one at that. We are not peers.

Re:OK, but which one?

[Rick the Red]

You have a good reason to use Windows, so just use it; don't make your poor son suffer just because you have a personal problem with it.

LOL! My wife works at Microsoft; I interviewed there (twice). I use Windows 2000, NT4, ME, 98, and 95 just about every day. I have an advance copy of XP I'm going to load on my laptop after Labor Day weekend (know your enemy and all that :-) I also use Linux, our firewall runs Linux, and when I get it re-built our server will run Linux (currently it runs NT Server). I don't have a problem using Windows, and my wife doesn't have a problem with me and the servers using Linux. She's not likely to ask for an account on the Linux side, but she's all in favor of our boy learning and using both systems. My sister has a Mac, and if our boy learns that as well that's OK by us. I've got a Sinclair (not a Timex) in the basement that he's welcome to play with if he ever shows the interest.

after all, dual booting is the best option for your son's needs.

Actually, a pure Windows PC is the best option for my son's needs. But for the family's needs I wanted him to run a Linux PC (I didn't get into details, but his PC is on the 2nd floor, and I wanted to use it to host the 802.11b card, which would require Linux on that box, full-time. The only other Linux boxes are in the basement, and my laptop, but the laptop can't act as the 802.11b access point! Don't even think about suggesting Windows is good enough for that application -- I'm not stupid enough to allow anyone in the neighborhood onto our LAN.)

After reading the comments here it looks like I'll need two PCs on the 2nd floor, one with Windows for my son, and one with Linux for the 802.11b card.

Meanwhile, I've discovered this site, which encourages me to give him Linux as well as Windows. So I'll run one of the several suggested X-terminals on his PC and host his Linux stuff on another box.

Re:OK, but which one?

[Rick the Red]

What hardware? There is no such thing as 400MHz Duron, 600MHz was the first and slowest sold and these things cannot even be "underclocked" to anything less than 500MHz.

The computer is a hand-me-down from one of my nephews. He upgraded the motherboard and found the new one wouldn't take all his old cards, and when they were done they had enough left over to make a decent PC, so they offered it to us. I've not yet seen it, but they told me it's a 400MHz Duron. I don't doubt that they got that wrong; maybe it's a K6-2 or something.

Re:OK, but which one?

[brycenut]

Watch out on VMware to run kids games, as it doesn't support the 8-bit (256 colors) color depth that many kids games require. There is a way to turn on support for it, but believe me, it is horrid and unworkable.

I don't know about win4lin, and I've only tried a limited # of kids games under WINE, as many require quicktime.

In the end, a cheap machine for the kids is the best solution I can think of. An older pentium system, or a celeron/duron homebrew will run all the reader rabbit type games.

A final hint, with a medium size hard drive you can image it after you setup the system, and when they crash it, you can just ghost it back over.

Re:OK, but which one?

[Ridiculator]

You'd be surprised at how often I have to swoop into action around here.

Re:OK, but which one?

[Rick the Red]

Update on my other reply. I got the computer from my nephew this weekend. Last night I took the heatsink off the chip, and to my delight I discovered it's a 500MHz K6-2. Cool -- an extra 100MHz for "free"! So now my 5 year old has the most powerful computer in the house! (mom & dad each have 266MHz PII IBM Thinkpads, the server's a 300MHz K6-2, and the firewall's a 133MHz 486)

So I was misinformed and you are right -- it's not a 400MHz Duron.

wine still not prime time

[Z4rd0Z]

From the sounds of the article, wine hasn't progressed much beyond the last time I used it a year ago or so. That's disappointing. When I used it, it definitely needed windows to run anything at all and it sounds like that's still the case.

Re:wine still not prime time

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine has progressed a LOT since I last tried it (which was probably closer to two years ago) (I tried it a few days ago). I'm very impressed at the progress, although obviously it would be nicer if it went faster.

Personally, I've always had noticably better experience downloading the latest tarball and building myself than using a version packaged with a distro. And I have an existing Windows partition, which no doubt helps.

Re:wine still not prime time

[HeUnique]

Well, Wine has been progressed lately quite nicely..

I have just finished to test some apps on it today - here's whats going on...

1. Quicktime 5 - it runs, but screen gets black and some flashes and the TCP/IP stack implementation of wine is not complete - so no streaming, but playing sorenson based coded files plays ok..

2. Adobe Page Maker 6.5 (trial version) - runs perfectly.

3. Windows Media 6.4 - plays files and streams, but fail to download & install new codecs.

so, it's progressing..

Re:wine still not prime time

[pdiaz]

don't forget starcraft :-)

(yep, starcraft. And runs very nicely without windows, using only the wine libs)

Re:wine still not prime time

[windi]

->and it sounds like that's still the case.

Actually no. Todays Wine can run Windows applications without needing Windows.

Enterprise Level

[XPulga]

From the article: VMware GSX Server is an enterprise-level product and is priced accordingly.The electronic distribution(...)costs $2,499

Wrong. Apache is an enterprise-level product that is priced accordingly.

VMware GSX Server is an absolute must for any company looking to maintain multiple centralized development environments.

Wrong again. Removing MS Windows from all workstations is an absolute must for any company looking to maintain a decent development environment. Note change in wording: if the environment is centralized and multiple, you only have to maitain the "center" (server), and leaf node configuration is straightforward, right ?

Re:Enterprise Level

[core_blimey]

Unless you have a centralised Development server, and a centralised Test server, and a centralised Maintenance server and...

Multiple Centralised Servers. You don't want a change in Development filtering out to other environments until such time as they go into testing or release.

As for VMWare, it seems to work fine on NT as well, we run 3 of our 5 centralised environments on the one box, saves on RAID controllers and Gbit ports too.

Unfair to Wine? Yes and No

[Dante Aliegri]

It appears that they were a bit unfair to
wine ( but not really on purpose )
They seemed light hearted enough about it
that I believe the mistake was accidental.

What mistake is this, you might ask?
They tried running Microsoft Applications!
( the exception being Paint Shop Pro .. )
Not only that, but I'm not quite sure what the
snapshot date was on the wine that they used.
I have used Photoshop perfectly in wine.
Photoshop! I can also run Netscape. Just the other day, I got Real to completly work,
which I believe is an indication that they
have winsock2 working.

In the end, what should be added is this:
running apps in wine isn't what you think it is.
Just because wine has been in development for a few years, and doesn't work, doesn't mean it will be a few more years before it works! Chances are that it is a single call ( or family of calls, as DDE and COM are still under developement, afaicr .. ) that makes it not work. Thus, having a working app may be as little as a snapshot away.

--Dante

Re:Unfair to Wine? Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed with the latest tarball, and my Photoshop 6 doesn't run at all :/ I was very impressed in other regards though, specifically when Microsoft Word actually ran, and I could even perform rudimentary editing tasks with it! I was equally impressed when I fired up Visual Studio and most things seemed to work.

Application support has traditionally been a bit "volatile" with wine releases .. i.e. an app working with one release might not work at all with the next. Obviously they still have a long way to go, but they've also come a long way already.

I agree this review was a little unfair towards Wine ... comparing to something like VMWare, which doesn't really do the same thing, and costs a CRAPload of money (I severely balked at the price when wanting to get it the other day ..), isn't exactly fair.

Re:Unfair to Wine? Yes and No

[redcliffe]

I agree. I have Microsoft Windows Media Player working fine under Wine on my Linux machine. Streaming, everything works perfectly.

I'd read the article...

[toxcspdrmn]

...only the advertisement on the page keeps freezing Opera.

Re:I'd read the article...

[toxcspdrmn]

That's Opera for Win 98 - I'll exorcise this PC just as soon as I have convinced myself I know what I'm doing...

Re:I'd read the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

...sounds like someone needs to get into their preferences and disable image loading..

Re:I'd read the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, if you have a program that is actually capable of freezing when it gets bad input, then that program is buggy.

If the normal and typical operation of the program is such that its inputs comes from different people all over the world, some untrustworthy, some stupid, some malicious, and it is still possible for the program to freeze when it gets the inevitable bad input, then it's not just buggy: it's crap. Crap, because one of the fundamental needs of such a program would be that it distrust everything that it is told.

So why haven't you yet deleted this program that you know to be crap?

Re:I'd read the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

*weeping* Because I've got no where else to go... */weeping*

Re:I'd read the article...

[toxcspdrmn]

Surely, the point is not that Opera is more or less buggy than IE or Netscape (I'm not qualified to judge), but that web pages are mostly written to take the bugs of the big two into account.

Whatever - I like Opera and find that if I write html that displays properly in it, it _always_ works in the other browsers.

Comparing Apples and Oranges

[ClubStew]

It seems to me that comparing VMWare (and the like) to Wine is like comparing apples and oranges. VMWare actually creates a virtual machine posting BIOS again and thus starting your target platform by the partition you're in. Wine emulates function calls on linux (and libraries, of course) but still runs as the base operating system. How do these even compare?

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

They compare because they purport to allow you to do the same thing: Use Windows applications under Linux. Seems that comparing WINE to a real emulator would be very appropriate.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges

[ClubStew]

But they do it in entirely different ways. When you benchmark something for performance, you have to have a common ground. Yes, they do both let you run Windows apps on linux, but in completely different ways. Of course an emulator will run slower, but a virtual machine won't, sans the currently-used resources from the other running OS.

Ziffed Again

[Sandlund]

That lovely Ziff banter. That, we're oh so with it, insouciance. Any surprise that the light tone reflects the complete inability to make its tests mirror the real world?

Couldn't they at least have included something like QuickBooks in the app mix? QB capability is one of those real-world things that is keeping several small businesses from moving to Linux. As opposed to Word and Excel, for which there are plenty of worthy replacements.

Re:Ziffed Again

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't use Linux for that, only for games. I've got a real machine with Windows on it that's dedicated to QuickBooks.

Citrix Metaframe

[jred]

For business users, this rocks. I could go on & on about it, but if you need to know about it, you probably already do. I only mention it because they talked about that netthing app that uses a windows host & java in a browser. Citrix can do that & so much more. Beware the printer issues, though...

Plex86

[Anonymous Coward]

What about plex86 the ppl there have been doing great work and its getting as good as VM ware.

Re:Plex86

[Micah]

Huh? I looked at their site recently and they haven't released anything since March. I thought they were almost dead.

Re:Plex86

[Anonymous Coward]

The key problem with plex86 seems to be that the core VMWare-like portion is written by a single guy and while sometimes he produces amazing results in a week, other times he just noodles around tweaking things for a month or two. He's employed by one of the distros, so perhaps sometimes they have more important work for him.

The less important problems are
1. The mailing list archive is run by some morons who keep changing the URL back and forth for no obvious reason.
2. The web site is "maintained" by someone who hasn't felt it to be necessary to update it or even really look after it at all.
3. The FTP site has a number of snapshots with names like "new-version" that are completely useless unless you were there when they were created.

If you think this project deserves more loving care, and have a history of actually COMING THROUGH rather than volunteering for things and never actually doing any work, please subscribe to the plex86 mailing list, and step forward to help.

Wine and VMWare

[term0r]

When I have tried these two products myself, I found Wine performed well upto expectations, even if certain programs did require quite a large amount of configuration to get running. VMWare on the other hand run very slow, and was close to unusable on a k6-2-500.

Theres nothing better than a quick game of sol.exe straight after installing Wine :)

Good Point

[Anonymous Coward]

And in their mind they can justify it. On one hand spouting off about how great Linux is and how it can do anything and everything Windows can do only better. Yet on the other hand they steal Windows True Type fonts, so they can read a web page in a crappy browser, dualboot or use emulators whenever they need to do meaningful work or even play games.

It seems to me that if the Open Source community was half as strong as they profess, there would be ample software that they would *rather* use on Linux than Windows. Yet this is not the case, they always go back to Windows.

Excuse me, my Linux box just crashed, do you have a MS-DOS boot disk that I could use?

Re:Good Point

[orangesquid]

Normally I don't "feed the trolls," but this person has stated a few of his opinions as fact, which is one of man's most infamous fallacies. Nothing personal against the author of the comment, but I feel I need to address some of the issues presented...

Note: I don't profess that everything below is proven or easily-demonstrated fact. In fact, just to say right out, all of this is my opinion, but I feel my points are practical and easily applicable to many members of the Linux-using community.

"It seems to me that if the Open Source community was half as strong as they profess, there would be ample software that they would *rather* use on Linux
than Windows. "

Exactly.

I use Linux, and I've found good GPL programs that I've even found preferable over Windows programs. You don't hear me complaining about a lack of programs for Linux; the only game I play [besides simple things like mines, sol, same, tetris, and the like] is Quake II, which Linux runs without a hitch.

Now to address some of the points raised...

The most common webpage-reading-problem under UNIX is actually because of the way MS Word converts things to HTML (namely, *incorrectly* -- it does not adhere to the publicized HTML standards.)

And TrueType is actually... (yes, you guessed it) Macintosh technology! (details here) True, the fonts may be from Windows... although there's plenty of free TT fonts out there, and I use those for TT work [which I've done all of... once? hah], not the ones shipped by MS.

I don't dual boot, I don't use emulators, and I do plenty of meaningful work. I use things like AbiWord, LaTeX, vi, PHP, perl, ICON, gcc, Spice and the like to do what I need to do, which includes word processing, network administration, electrical circuit design, and programming in several languages.

Crappy browser? Lynx isn't crappy. It's incapable, sure... but if you want more capabilities, there's a spinoff project that adds all sorts of crazy features to lynx, called links -- it's like IE without graphics.

And if you want the graphics, there's always galeon, Konqueror, Netscape, Mozilla, or Opera...

I haven't gone back to Windows. Maybe that means I'm not an actual member of the community, hah! :)

And I frequently find it's easier to use Linux boot disks to fix DOS and Windows machines, due to the plethora of disk and MBR utilities available for free for Linux that fit easily on a floppy or two along with a few necessary boot files.

Oh yes, and before I forget, I'm not saying any of this to piss anybody off. I just want you to know that Linux works for me. Maybe I *am* an oddball [very likely true ;)] but I *do* use Linux successfully.

Starcraft

[panda]

The only thing that matters is how well these babies can handle Starcraft.

I haven't tried any of the others, but I can say that Wine does an excellent job of running Starcraft on Red Hat 7.1. I've played for four hours straight and no crashes!

Now, if I can just get it to work with Wine on FreeBSD!

Re:Starcraft

[OzJimbob]

Yeah wine does starcraft brilliantly! The only problem I have is that occasionally starcraft crashes if lots is going on on screen...if that happens my system pretty much crashes (well...i know the _kernal_ hasn't crashed) because wine's got control of my video card.

Because

[Anonymous Coward]

Those apps aren't actually running on that box. Their still running on their native platform acroos the network. All your getting is the screen shots.

Excuse me?

[TACD]

Now, I wouldn't say I know a great deal about Linux, or the Open Source community; but it seems to me somewhat pointless to go to all this trouble evading Windows and the Microsoft evilness if you are just going to emulate them and their file formats.

Isn't the whole idea of Linux to invent your own stuff; while it might be convenient to emulate and/or convert MS stuff, it's even more convenient (from that point of view) to actually use MS.

I'm not intending to promote MS here. I hate them too, I'm just not knowledgeable enough to use Linux (and frankly, it isn't worth my time to learn). Plus, I wish to evade the modstick.

It seems to me (your average Joe Bloggs) that the way to go is to invent your own (free (and presumably superior)) file formats, and prove them superior through their use! Force goddamn MS to emulate you! And you know it can be done, look at Quicktime... (Or PDF, or MP3, I think...)

Re: Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Isn't the whole idea of Linux to invent your own stuff; while it might be convenient to emulate and/or convert MS stuff, it's even more convenient (from that point of view) to actually use MS.
...
It seems to me (your average Joe Bloggs) that the way to go is to invent your own (free (and presumably superior)) file formats, and prove them superior through their use! Force goddamn MS to emulate you! And you know it can be done, look at Quicktime... (Or PDF, or MP3, I think...)"

Depends; if all you want to do is your own work, then the existing Linux file formats for various tasks are fine.

If you want to be able to exchange work with others who use MS-format files not supported under Linux, then you need a way to at least open those files / run those apps, at least until the open source equivalent becomes available.

..and for something like a tax preparation program, that time may never come.

Re: Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair questions! Since there are better word processors out there, why WOULD anyone want to be able to run, for example, Word?

I have a few theories.
1) Consumers want to protect the investment they've already made in their software
2) Consumers do not want to admit that made a bad purchase and look foolish
3) Vendors want to give people options
4) Consumers are feed 'documents' in proprietary file formats, and are expected to return 'documents' in like format (or maybe even {shudder} *want* to.)
5) Vendors want to 'embrace and extend' a competitors 'monopoly' position
6) Vendors wish to dilute the monopoly, to ALLOW competition
7) StarOffice is too slow

I personally find a pure text file is much better for task lists than anything else. (And way more portable.) But like they say, it takes all types.

If you were to try Linux, you will see that it really is not as daunting as you imagine.

Re: Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, but I think you're missing one point: typically a non-Windows user gets along fine without needing Windows for 99% of what they do... until they need just one little thing that is Windows-only*. Running a Windows emulator 5 minutes a week is more convenient than running Windows full time.

(*) In my case, that one little thing is PCAnywhere, a program that uses a proprietary undocumented protocol that no other programs are compatable with, and yet must be used due to the fact that it's what my customers have installed. So I have a whole NT partition with exactly one application installed on it. I would much rather be able to run that app in an emulator, than have to drop everything I'm working on and reboot.

Re: Excuse me?

[TACD]

Thank you all for educating me in matters Linux. :-) (And for further increasing my respect for you chaps). Who knows, perhaps some weekend I will send my poor 56k modem on the week-long excursion of a download. (About 600Mb, am I wrong?)

Although I still have this feeling that a lot of my programs (and games) won't work under it, I've heard phrases such as 'programming your own drivers' which frankly give me the screaming heebie-jeebies. What's this about?

Anyway, since ATM Apache, GNU, and so forth are just words to me I will have to do some private research before I embark on anything.

Re: Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

I found that the nicest modem installable linux was Debian, the base was up and running after maybe 20mb (from memory, scuse if error), and then I could pick and choose what else to install. But its not a pick for newbies. Best bet is to buy a linux on cd, you'll get manuals which will probably really really help, not to mention avoiding the download thing.

Re: Excuse me?

[really?]

Dude,

E-mail me your postal address and I'll be more than happy to send you a CDR or two with the distribution of your choice - or *BSD, or any freely distributable OS.

(I'll cover the postage too. In exchange you need to "do something nice" for someone, when you have a chance.)

Re: Excuse me?

[whaley]

Or just order a cd, for example from CheapBytes

Why dual booting is no good

[The Larch]

I have a linux box which I use for most of my stuff. I have all my files on ext3fs partitions because it's faster and more reliable than vfat, and more importantly because it has proper Unix semantics. I also have lots of things in crontab because I'm a lazy bum and don't want to do anything manually that I can possibly automate.

Now, I also like to play Civilization II of which I own a windows copy; I don't know if it's available for Linux and in any case I've already paid for the Windows version. I could reboot into Windows and play my game, but that would mean that I wouldn't have any of my applications available, none of my files would be accessible, and none of my cron jobs would get run.

Running CivII in a VMWare box is the best of both worlds. Sure, the graphics are a little sluggish, and the sound is choppy (bug in VMWare for Linux), but it's quite playable and quite stable, and it looks like any old window on my desktop, and I can put it away for a minute and the come back to it if I need to do something else.

And of course VMware offers some cool extras, such as the ability to roll back changes to a virtual hard drive -- this is wonderful for checking out Windows software, as you are guaranteed a quick and easy (1 second, 2 clicks) return path from any installation or upgrade, no matter what it did to your registry and "system" dll's..

Dreamweaver on Linux

[InsaneCreator]

Does anyone have Macromedia Dreamweaver 3 or 4 working with WINE? That app is the only reason I'm still using Windows!

Re:Dreamweaver on Linux

[hyperstation]

not trying to troll, but why on earth is dreamweaver holding you to windows?

Re:Dreamweaver on Linux

[asincero]

Probably because it runs on Windows.

- Arcadio

Re:Dreamweaver on Linux

[Christianfreak]

Why dreamweaver? There are HTML editors for Linux as well. And I don't care what anyone says-- No HTML editor on any platform anywhere can substitute clean code written from scratch

Re:Dreamweaver on Linux

[InsaneCreator]

Well, DW generates pretty good HTML source. And it has a lot of great features, like templates, library items, updating... You don't get that if you write code in some text editor. And most important - it takes a lot less time and even with fast developement I have more work than I can handle for the next 2 months. WebDesign still is a goldmine :)

Re:Dreamweaver on Linux

[jchristopher]

Because it's the best visual layout tool available for designing complex HTML pages with layers, tables, stylesheets, etc. Period.

It also manages to write decent (not great) code in the process, in contrast to every other GUI tool I've used.

The currently available HTML editors for Linux, while fine, are NOT the equivalent of Dreamweaver. Sometimes open source is the best tool, sometimes it isn't. In this case, Dreamweaver is easily the best tool.

So which one is faster??

[pjrc]

I read the entire thing, looking to see which one may be fastest. I have vmware now... and it's "livable" in terms of speed (full screen with their vga-fifo driver installed). At least it's ok running windows 95 on a 800 MHz machine, but there is noticable slowness. It's not nearly as fast as running native.

Saddly, what little mention of speed they had was very vauge statements that certain things were too slow. They did minimal testing on each one, and what they did try wasn't even the same or similar software on the different emulators.

So I'm no closer to knowing if I win4lin, for example, would be overall faster (as they claim) than vmware which I currently own (well, license, but I paid, damnit). I very well may shell out another $79 if something like win4lin is significantly faster. They say it is... but like all software it comes with no warranty and they won't take it back and refund me if it doesn't live up to their promises.

Wouldn't it be great if, say, some magazine were to compare these emulators and publish some useful comparisions?

<rant mode on>

Well, it'll probably be quite a while until we see any real comparison of these emulators, since these ZDnet bastards just cranked out this lame-ass deadline-driven excuse for a review. ... not that they give a damn ... reporters always use the "tight deadline" excuse for doing a poor job, instead of actually feeling sorry about it.

This little rant won't solve anything, but at least it makes me feel a bit better. Maybe someone from vmware, netraverse, or menta might read through these comments. The anonymous idiots/authors at zdnet/metagroup certainly aren't, since they seem to care so little about about this topic.

<rant mode off>

Re:So which one is faster??

[HeUnique]

The conclusion is pretty simple..

If you want to run your office apps and have Windows 95/98/98SE/ME (not sure about Win ME - anyone?) - then use Win4Lin 3.0

If your app requires even a single call to any DirectX stuff (like full-screen with Direct Draw) - then it won't run on Win4Lin.

Win4Lin run "normal" apps (that doesn't requires DirectX) much faster then VMWare.

Now - if you want to run Windows NT/2000/XP or Another Operating system (Linux) then the only option you have is VMWare - but you'll need lots of memory (which is cheap), and a strong processor. VMWare however - is slower compared to Win4Lin but it runs much more software.

Now - I didn't see they mention it - but if you need to run MULTIPLE VMWare sessions at once, with scripting support (VM1 turns on VM2 to do XYZ and then turns of VM2 etc...) - then you'll need VMWare GSX which got a pretty big price tag - $2500

If you want to run some serious numbers of VM's at once (15,20,30 etc) - then you'll need VMWare ESX - which is an entirly different product (it's bootable VMWare without any hosting OS) - a really strong machine (4 processors minimum), tons of memory (gigabytes), and very fast hard drives and network. You'll get a special console which is Redhat 6.2 + perl scripts to do all the maintaining stuff - and for each user you'll need to install special KVM software (keyboard, video, mouse) - price tag - $11.200 + precentages..

Re:So which one is faster??

[RavenDuck]

Netraverse don't seem to have released any kernel patches since 2.4.5, so if you're running a cutting edge kernel (like I suspect quite a few people here are), then your choices are somewhat diminished.

Re:So which one is faster??

[Anonymous Coward]

At least it's ok running windows 95 on a 800 MHz machine, but there is noticable slowness.

How much memory do you have? How much is dedicated to windows? Are you using raw disk? I have a celeron 500Mhz, 512meg ram (256 for windows), and use raw disk, and I can't tell the difference between running through vmware and running directly.

Re:So which one is faster??

[ewen]

So I'm no closer to knowing if I win4lin, for example, would be overall faster (as they claim) than vmware which I currently own (well, license, but I paid, damnit). I very well may shell out another $79 if something like win4lin is significantly faster.

Between my company and myself I own two copies of VMWare (one VMWare workstation, one VMWare Express -- VMWare Express is basically VMWare Workstation, but configured to run only Windows 95/98, and much cheaper), and two copies of Win4Lin.

Windows 98 in VMWare on a Dual Pentium Pro/200 with the special drivers, run full screen, was usable for interactive things (Word, Excel, etc), but too slow without the special drivers. It was clearly much "slower than the real thing" too. Windows 98 in VMWare on an Athlon 900 is very usable; although certainly "slower than the real thing". (The Dual PPro is now being used as a test server, running various VMWare instances; the flexibility of doing that makes up for the speed loss.)

Windows 98 in Win4Lin is very usable on my Pentium 200 laptop, more so than VMWare was on a Dual Pentium Pro/200. Windows 95 (OSR2) in Win4Lin is also very usable remotely displayed to a diskless workstation (Pentium 200-based, over a dedicated 100Mbps Ethernet link), from a Duron 700 system.

I'd guesstimate that Win4Lin gives you around 90% of the performance of Windows native on the hardware for many things, and VMWare gives you something like 50% of the native performance. I've run Windows natively on my laptop (its configured to dual boot), and didn't find Windows in Win4Lin noticably too slow for anything I did (well not much more so than natively: big compile jobs took ages!). But I'd never try running VMWare on that Pentium 200 laptop.

If you can live with Win4Lin's restrictions (less emulation of hardware, more merging of things, business applications focus, need for a patched kernel), then I'd definitely recommend it where speed is an issue. But for the things I do I have uses for both Win4Lin and VMWare, for slightly different tasks.

FWIW, I've been using Win4Lin 1.0 and Win4Lin 2.02; I've heard that Win4Lin 3.0 is at least as good (from someone who has used all three), but haven't yet upgraded myself. Only Win4Lin 3.0 is supported with the recent kernel patches though, so I'll need to upgrade soon. Finally both Win4Lin and VMWare benefit from having lots of memory available; VMWare needs more memory to get to its sweet spot than Win4Lin does though.

Re:So which one is faster??

[Thing 1]

but if you need to run MULTIPLE VMWare sessions at once, with scripting support (VM1 turns on VM2 to do XYZ and then turns of VM2 etc...) - then you'll need VMWare GSX which got a pretty big price tag - $2500

Just a thought (trying to save some money)... You could run two VMWare sessions at once (if not in the same login, then through a second one). That part can be scripted.

Now, they can both access the same disk, so we could use a semaphore file for them to communicate. Two, really, so they don't collide in writing. And each new write could increment the filename, so that they are both producers and consumers (from CS101).

Then you could define APIs to communicate with, which at their root would access the disk. The filename would be

for$machine2from$pid$user$machine1[++$i].txt

-- so the daemon know which PID to send the reply back to (and an incrementing part, in case that PID sends multiple messages).

Actually, that sounds like a good thing to have regardless -- write it in Perl, and have it send Perl code to be eval()ed. Then it could do anything, use Win32::GUI, cmd-line args, run other programs, gather output, etc. And any output is sent back to the original PID. That way it can be like

$rc = `grep -i foo bar.txt`;

but with different punctuation. Make it a sub, and it'll be

$rc = pcomm("grep -i foo bar.txt");

.

I think I'll start working on that.

The many uses for VMs

[alienmole]

I used to use a four-way switch and have up to four computers connected. I threw that all out once I got VMWare.

Using VMWare, I can keep a stable base environment and develop and test code on multiple platforms: various Linux distros, plus multiple Windows flavors in my case.

In addition to that, I can install stuff that I'm evaluating in a virtual OS - including in a virtual Linux running on top of Linux - and if it causes any problems, I haven't affected my base environment.

With VMWare, the state of a virtual machine can be suspend in seconds, and you can shut down the physical machine and come back to exactly where you left off, right down to the state of the Caps Lock key and the mouse cursor. In the middle of some complex development and want to take a break to play a game? Just suspend the VM you're working in, play your game, and resume the VM you want.

I can save multiple configurations of each OS, and keep copies of old configurations to go back to if I need to. It's like having a whole swath of preinstalled partitions, except you don't have to reboot your machine to switch between them, and you can run more than one at the same time.

The only caveat to all of the above is that it needs a lot of memory and disk space to work well - figure at least 64MB per running VM, ideally more; and at least 1-2GB per VM disk image. Good CPU performance doesn't hurt, either. The upside is that these days, this is all pretty cheap. I currently run with 512MB RAM and 2x30GB disks, on a dual CPU box, and the only performance issue I'm ever aware of is a bit of mouse lag.

WINE Shouldn't apply...

[nicholasperez]

For the very simple reason that "Wine Is Not an Emulator" :) Pesky reporting types that are clueballs for recursive acronyms

Wine is not an emulator.

[antis0c]

Wine is not an emulator it doesn't emulate the x86-windows platform on Linux, Wine translates API calls from Windows into X, thus these results are incorrect.

Re:Wine is not an emulator.

[OzJimbob]

Did you even read the article??? it makes a point about saying that Wine isn't an emulator!

Re:Wine is not an emulator.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two interpretations of the WINE acronym.
I think both are considered valid.

WINdows Emulator -- because that's what it does, it emulates the Windows API.

WINE Is Not an Emulator -- somewhat tongue-in-cheek ala GNU, but true in the since that it does not emulate any hardware (i.e., x86 instruction set).

Remember "emulator" isn't so narrowly defined as to exclude an emulation of an API.

VMWare vs Win4Lin vs Raw Windows

[PhotoGuy]

I used to be a big VMWare fan, and still am. But mainly for getting a "pure PC", not specifically for running Windows. I used to run Windows in it a lot, but once I tried Win4Lin, I switched over completely. I still use VMWare for trying out FreeBSD and other OS's, but for running Windows apps, Win4Lin clearly wins for me. Here's why:

Win4Lin (by default) uses the native underlying Linux file system, which is faster than FAT32. It boots Windows faster than a booting Windows on a bare PC on the same hardware. If you've booted windows under Win4Lin recently (so Linux caches the files referenced), and need to restart (say, after installing any damn windows app :-), you can reboot in 10 seconds!

If Windows does blue-screen (which it does far less in Win4Lin than native), there's no scandisk required, as Linux is the one handling the file system access.

I use it on top of SGI's XFS on a laptop, which is even better. I haven't had done an fsck or a scandisk in months :-) Life is good.

There is the odd limitation, and obviously for gaming you'd want to reboot to native Windows. But in general, I don't boot windows natively any more. Oh yeah, it has sound support, too, which I find works quite well. (Seems to me VMWare didn't support sound, although I could be wrong on that point.)

So if you need a pure PC for testing or QA, or want to try different OS's, I heartily recommend VMWare. But for access to Windows apps, Win4Lin I find much better. Oh yeah, you can map any Unix directory to Win4Lin virtual drives, too. Much easier than VMWare's Samba bridging stuff (which I never could get working consistently). Win4Lin is much cheaper, too ($79 vs. $299, or something like that).

Re:VMWare vs Win4Lin vs Raw Windows

[asincero]

Ya .. .Win4Lin is good stuff. I use it too. However, it can actually lock your entire box up nice and tight. Its been a pretty rare occurance so far, but I've experienced Win4Lin crashing the box. Though I should probably mention that the Win4lin kernel patch didn't entirely apply cleanly to my kernel, so I had to hand patch some things. Theres always the chance I screwed that part up.

But overall, Win4lin is great. Though the VMWare guys also offer a toned-down, Win9x-only, version of VMware that costs about the same as Win4lin. Supposedly this version is more optimized to run Win9x.

- Arcadio

Re:VMWare vs Win4Lin vs Raw Windows

[ThePythonicCow]

I too prefer Win4Lin now. My home machine has been running Win98 for a long time, because I needed Quicken (Q), and my wife needed Lotus Wordpro (LWP), or a similar polished word processor. I had tried converting to Linux, running VMWare for Q and LWP, but it always seemed more elaborate than I had time to master.

I had troubles getting Win4Lin installed, and like another person on this thread found the teech support for NeTraverse unable to help much. But its command line install scripts were simple enough to grok, and I muddled through.

I learned the following during the Win4Lin install to a Mandrake 8.0 running high security with a 433 MHz Celeron and 256 Mb memory.

1) Don't try the install with a CDPATH lacking "." - the scripts contain cmds resembling "mkdir x; cd x" which fail if CDPATH is set, but lacking ".".

2) Don't try to install or run Win4Lin with your /var partition mounted "nodev", for Win4Lin needs numerous devices under /var/win4lin/mrgdev. Actually I made this path a symlink to another partition, just for Win4Lin, so I could continue to run /var mounted "nodev". I don't want to make it easy for hackers to put special device files in
/var/tmp.

3) If you're an old cheap skate like me, still installing Win98 as an upgrade from a set of Win3.1 floppies, then
allow 30 seconds between each floppy insertion when validating your Win 3.1 floppies to the Win98 installer. The floppy change is missed, and there is a 30 second timeout buried in there somewhere.

Hopefully the above 3 tips will help someone.

I encouraged NeTraverse to add the above to their FAQ's (or actually fix code or docs), but given their recent layoffs and such, I don't expect much there.

Anyway, I am now happily running my home machine with Mandrake 8.0, still using Quicken, Lotus WordPro and TheBat mail client from Windows via Win4Lin, and InfoSelect running under Dosemu.

I tried converting my wife to Abiword, but the lack of anti-aliased font support, and a strange printing bug (hyphen char on line causes last char on line to print mangled) caused that effort to fail big time.

I have a Linux desktop icon for my wife that always switches to Win4Lin running full screen windows. The script behind the icon looks to see if Win4Lin is already running. If not, it invokes "fwin -auth &". If it is running,
it flips to the Virtual Terminal on which Win4Lin is presumably running. That is, it does a programmatic equivalent of Ctrl-Alt-F10, using essentially the following code:

#include <linux/vt.h>
main() {
int fd = open ("/dev/tty10", 2);
ioctl (fd, VT_ACTIVATE, 10);
}

If you're Win4Lin full screen is on VT 8 (typical Red Hat) instead of 10 (as in my Mandrake install) then replace
both '10' above with '8'.

Not just Windows

[stu_coates]

The article didn't mention that VMWare does just allow you to run Windows on top of Linux. I'm currently running Windows 2000, OpenBSD 2.9, Solaris 8 x86, and Slackware 8 under VMWare environments on top of a Slackware 8 install. Everything runs great (graphics are a little slow), and it's a lot easier than having 4 or 5 different machines around.

I'm developing software that needs to run on all of these platforms and the current setup makes debugging easier.

One word of advice for anyone thinking about running VMWare: get plently of memory... especially if you intend running multiple VMs concurrently. The 2GB that I have is rapidly depleted when a few VMs are going.

From the article....

[Anonymous Coward]

(Okay, the glasses are really champagne flutes, but we won't quibble. After all, it's a work in progress.)


Isn't Champagne just sparkling wine?

Two approaches

[infiniti99]

Well you really have two approaches in the current crop of programs for "emulating Windows". I'll narrow them down to two applications: VMWare and WINE. VMWare can actually run any x86 OS, not just Windows, but for sake of argument we'll assume we're working with Windows.

VMWare Pros:

• Emulates an x86 and much of its hardware
• Zero software incompatibilities

VMWare Cons:

• Slow
• Some hardware incompatibilities (VMWare doesn't have 3D support, for instance)
• Runs in a self-contained window

WINE Pros:

• Fast
• Lots of hardware support, including DirectX acceleration and 3D.
• Applications run as native apps

WINE Cons:

• Many software incompatibilities

So there you have it. Problems in one are generally made up in the other. This isn't to say that these programs will have such "Cons" for all time, but this is how it stands now. Ironically, VMWare does a simpler task (emulating x86 instead of emulating Windows directly) and winds up with more compatibility.

For me, I use VMWare to run any necessary Windows applications. I don't play games on my PC at all, so this works perfectly. There is absolutely no reason for me to ever dual boot. I can run IE, Media Player, etc. It all works without a hitch. Granted, VMWare is not free, but $100 wasn't much for me considering I haven't spent much on Linux software anyway.

The only odd-men-out are PC gamers. Damn games! Here's to hoping Loki can pull through.

Re:Two approaches

[vwp]

Actually, this is not entirely true. VMWare cannot run OS/2, and specifically states that if you try to install OS/2.

Re:Two approaches

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare does not emulate an x86. It only hooks in at the device and system call level. I'm not sure where you get that it's slow, you probably haven't set it up with enough memory. Runs in a self-contained window can also be worked around by using X-windows.

DirectX

[Cloud K]

So I take it there are *still* no Windoze emulators that support DirectX?

The only thing I ever use Windows for these days is playing games (Everquest and Jumpgate), so I don't see any point in emulating a non-DX version :)

Re:DirectX

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.
Wine does have rather decent DirectX support,
although it is lacking the Direct3D part.
If you need D3D functionality, too, then go for
TransGaming's http://sourceforge.net/projects/winex

Nobody *ever* mentioned here which "emulator"
exactly to use for DirectX stuff on Linux,
so I really felt I had to say this.

Needless to say, Wine(X) isn't perfect.
Which means that "normal" people will only
get about 50% of all games to run
(very rough estimate).

Andreas Mohr, Wine developer

Re:DirectX

[Cloud K]

I tried WineX - neither Everquest nor Jumpgate worked with it. In fact I got the impression nothing would work with it yet (too early in development)
Obviously you would know better about that than I do :)

Linux GUI's: KDE/GNOME/WINE

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the deal is to think of WINE not as a way of running Office (haven't ya hear of undocumented Windows being the bread and butter of MS apps?), but as another GUI for running stuff under Linux. Hope I don't get flamed, but instead of learning how to port my word-beater Windows app into KDE or GNOME, it may be simpler to tweak it to make it work under WINE as a way of porting it to Linux.

Re:Linux GUI's: KDE/GNOME/WINE

[Anonymous Coward]

how could you write a Word beater when you spend all your time being a meat beater?

Anyhow, all programs ported to XWindows with WINE are butt-ugly and crashy, so there's no advantage over GNOME.

Use the 'g' key

[Wee]

...sounds like someone needs to get into their preferences and disable image loading

Just hit the 'g' key a couple times. Toggles "show", "show but don't load", and "don't show/don't load" modes. There's no reason to dig anywhere.

And if you want to try something extra spiffy, hit F8, then hit 'g'. Now type in something and you'll get the Google search results for the term you entered.

-B

Re:Use the 'g' key

[toxcspdrmn]

But I like the pretty pictures!

Seriously, I thought it was an active component that was causing the problems - never thought to disable graphics.

I should mention that I'm not a developer (Linux or otherwise) but I'm slowly learning to be less of a luser. Slashdot helps.

Linux serving legacy COM objects?

[Anonymous Coward]

I choose an OS to run apps, which do jobs. Linux vs. Windows is a tradeoff of stability vs. availability of existing SW. If I've got a lot of well-implemented COM objects (no local state, 3tier, threadsafe: OOP), which of these "emulators" (including WINE, and any others) is the best platform for running a virtual WinNT, in turn running those COM objects, with a "watchdog" object polling for stability?

A pro server implementation would offer doubly+ redundant virtual WinNTs with failover to a running VM while rebooting a down VM. Can you make inter-VM calls? How about inter-VM DB-driver queries (eg. biz objs in VM1, DB in VM2)? If no Win GUI *at all* is used, which "emulator" environment gives 1> inter-VM communication, 2> execution performance (CPU/memory more important than IO).

--
"We do more after 2AM than most people do all day" - Krewe of After II

Re:Linux serving legacy COM objects?

[alienmole]

VMWare will do what you want. The pro server implementation you describe can be achieved using VMWare's higher-end offerings, GSX and ESX, which support scripting of VMs.

Can you make inter-VM calls? How about inter-VM DB-driver queries (eg. biz objs in VM1, DB in VM2)?

Yes. Inter-VM calls can be made across the "network" which VMWare sets up. You can host two NT VMs on a Linux box and they can talk to each other quite happily; and other machines on the network can talk to them, too. Each gets its own IP address, etc.

Although it's not COM, in one case I've used VMWare to run MS SQL Server 6.5 on a Linux box, with a Java application server running under native Linux. The performance is better than hosting the database on a separate machine with a 100Mbit connection, and it allows "legacy" databases (or other systems) to be used without dedicating a separate box for the purpose.

MSEULA

[B.B.Wolf]

The last couple of MS liscentiouses ( Oh my, did I misspell that!) I read forbid running the software on any system that does not have a valid license for a MS OS. I could quote an example but that would mean that I would have to turn on and boot the HP Kayak /w WindumpNT that my employer gave me to try to shut me up from bitching about all the MS BS files on the internal web sites and the labour reporting system that only works on ie and which is inferior to my ancient 125MHz PA-Risk workstation runing a 6 year old version of HP-UX, and that would mean that I would have to undergo a lengthy purification ritual.

Re:MSEULA

[Anonymous Coward]

So don't use the software under license. You're not gaining anything by accepting the EULA. It doesn't grant you any rights you wouldn't already have; You have no incentive to agree to it. So don't. Just use the software as you're already legally entitled to.

Missed VNC

[Silver A]

if ZDNet is going to review WinToNet, they should have reviewed VNC - it does essentially the same thing, and doesn't require a high-powered NT server, or Java. I've had a few problems with VNC, but the right-click works fine. I've even daisy-chained VNC sessions. My IT guy here, who's a Microsoft Man through and through, uses VNC on our servers to do remote work.

Re:Missed VNC

[Sabalon]

Only difference, from the sound of it, is that WinToNet sounds like it works like Terminal Services or Citrix - each person connects to the server and gets their own virtual desktop and session.

With VNC, you are seeing just what is on the "console" of the NT machine...as if you were sitting in front of the monitor. You can have multiple VNC connections to a machine, but only one person controlling it.

Re:Missed VNC

[Anonymous Coward]

plus with vnc the terminal is wide open on the remote machine, anybody walking by can hijack your session and operate it as you. unless, of course you have the terminal locked up in a secure room...

Isn't a windows emulator pointless?

[Sonicboom]

I don't know about the rest of you, but the reason I went over to Linux was to get a stable operating system that was reliable.

Over the years alot of great apps such as GiMP, StarOffice, etc.. have come along to keep people like me from going back towards using MS Windows.

I don't understand the point of installing MS Windows to run ontop of linux. Sure - it's fun from a software hacker's point of view - but in all sense it is almost a step in the wrong direction.

I'm not discounting the MS oper sys's - they have their place in the world - but for me I can't see the point. I run Linux as an ALTERNATIVE to running MS Windows...

Could someone please intelligently explain the point to this?

Thanks.

Re:Isn't a windows emulator pointless?

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on your job. Most people have jobs where they have to interact with other people. People are stupid. Most of them don't know anything about standards. So they save documents in native formats instead of interchange formats. They buy communications and networking products that use weird or "decommoditized" protocols instead of standard ones.

Again, depending on the nature of your job, you may or may not be able to insist that everyone stick to standards. If you're lucky, you can tell defectors to go to hell, or try again. Most people's jobs are such that they do not have the diplomatic power to do that. So, that 10 minutes per week when you have to read some text that is inside a MS Word document, or dial into someone's computer and repair their data, where they only have PCAnywhere, you might need to use nonstandard tools. Emulators are a way of being able to run those tools, without having to save all the things you were working on, close everything, log out, and reboot (twice), and wait for an OS to load (twice -- Windows once, and your favorite OS once).

It's a way to save time. (Or money, as an alternative to having two computers, one of which is 99.999% idle.)

Re:Isn't a windows emulator pointless?

[KerrAvonsen]

Sonicboom wrote: Over the years alot of great apps such as GiMP, StarOffice, etc.. have come along to keep people like me from going back towards using MS Windows.
I don't understand the point of installing MS Windows to run ontop of linux. Sure - it's fun from a software hacker's point of view - but in all sense it is almost a step in the wrong direction.
I'm not discounting the MS oper sys's - they have their place in the world - but for me I can't see the point. I run Linux as an ALTERNATIVE to running MS Windows...

What it boils down to is choice. Running an emulator (of whatever kind) gives one even more choice, more freedom. You can have your cake and eat it too. Of course, that still leaves the original question -- Why would anyone who is running a lovely stable operating system like Linux, want to us M$ Windows as well? People have already given a number of reasons:

• To check compatibility with M$ Windows (for example -- to check if your web pages work for those people who do use M$ Windows)
• To run M$ Windows software
  1. Because a Linux equivalent does not yet exist
  2. Because you need to be able to exchange data with others using the M$ product (and a good enough Linux equivalent still does not exist)
  3. Because you have a bunch of existing data (whether that be some WP format or DB format) which it would just take too much effort to convert over to a Linux equivalent

I myself have encountered situations like this. For example, the documentation for a project I work on is required by the client, to be in an M$ Word electronic format. We managed to get them to agree to RTF. We thought, hey, we'll use the same RTF source to produce an online HTML version of the docs, that'll wow 'em! We're a Unix house, we ended up writing our own RTF2HTML converter based on a public skeleton one... we dug into the spec for RTF, finding that, yes, we could link PNG pictures rather than embedding WMF pictures into the RTF files... we produced the HTML, after much wrestling with M$ Word to actually allow us to link the PNG pictures (it kept on wanting to produce WMF as well)... we produced the HTML! And the resultant RTF files... cannot be edited in StarOffice without completely messing them up. StarOffice simply wasn't good enough. I would really like to have a Windows emulator running on my box instead of having to go to the PC at the other end of the office to update the documentation. (Yes, I have raised the possibility of converting the documentation to LyX and producing PDF and HTML, but TPTB haven't gone for it)

Another example: at home, I have a very old version of M$ Access running on my PC, (why get an upgrade when the old one still worked?) which holds information about my video collection (about 500+ tapes). That data has been collected over many years, as my collection has grown, and I need it. I have a few choices:

1. I can dual-boot M$ Windows. This is what I currently do, but I am getting tired of it.
2. I can run a M$ Windows emulator. (Another pain, because unfortunately WINE won't work on my old software; I've yet to try the others)
3. I can convert the entire database into something completely different, like PostgreSQL. This is also a pain, and takes time to do.

Another example: I have a DVD disk on my PC (as many new PCs do). I want to play DVDs on it. Fortunately, with vlc I can, but its featureset is still not not full; it can play DVDs but you don't get the menu screens etc. I am willing to put up with that, but others want more features. If a windows emulation will enable them to run specific software that they like better, surely this is a Good Thing? Freedom of choice!

What it boils down to is what kind of tradeoffs one is willing to make, to get the things you want. And for many, a M$ Windows emulator will give them a solution which saves them time/money/effort/hassle.

Re:Isn't a windows emulator pointless?

[scrytch]

You perhaps run Linux as an alternative. I run it as a complement. On Windows, I like the games, I like IE as a browser, I like the unified scripting engine support, I like OLE, I like the easy printer installs, I like explorer extensions like TortoiseCVS.

I don't like the crappy IRC clients, the crippled commandline (cygwin is nice but not 100% there and it's kind of "weird" sometimes), the lack of mailbox scriptability (but I like the UI of mail clients on windows), and the $#@!$% file locking semantics I run into whenever I try to delete or move things.

So I like to cvs update files with tortoise, browse around them with one of the quick viewers (like the text file viewer in the resource kit), then do real development work on them with xemacs on the bsd side in vmware. Running bsd under vmware meant not having to worry about whether my cardbus pcmcia ethernet card was supported, or most other hardware for that matter.

This solution lets me test my server scripts on both IIS and apache (I know IIS is a gaping security hole so I only bind it to a local interface), and their output on ie, netscape, mozilla, and konquerer (if only writing HTML to spec was sufficient, *sigh*). And I don't even have to be connected to the network to do it, I do it all from one laptop wherever I am.

That's just my story, I'm sure other people have their own reasons.

Re:Isn't a windows emulator pointless?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that MS OS's have there place in the world as do ticks, mosquitos, and leaches.

article is unfair to wine

[Jacek Poplawski]

Look at Wine - it's opensource, it's quite small, and it lets me run
Fallout2 in Linux, without a single file from Microsoft Windows.
I amazed this is possible, and I don't think Wine is "unready", it's already usefull.

PS. and who needs graphical instator ?

Re:article is unfair to wine

[Far_From_Newbie]

but if you try using a product like WINE to run even a simple windows app like calculator or minesweeper, it's a whole new ballgame. In this regards....WINE is next to useless. GO VM!!!! (now if i could only think of a VM fight song) :-0

Old DOS Stuff as well?

[Montag2k]

I should first preface by saying that I have actually used Wine (gotten from Mandrake Cooker) to run things like Starcraft and AOL Instant messenger. Believe it or not, Starcraft actually runs flawlessly.

However, I have a vested interest in the old-skool Sierra games (Quest for Glory, etc.) that ran in DOS. I know that there are DOS emulators out there and I even tried really hard to get one to work way back when - but I was wondering if any of these Windows emulators actually worked for programs that ran in DOS mode. It would be interesting to get QFG2 running again, EGA gfx and all :-)

Re:Old DOS Stuff as well?

[mobius_stripper]

It's called dosemu.

Why would you want to run DOS programs under Wine, when you have a leaner emulator that does just the job you want? Windows is running these programs in a virtual (emulated) DOS window anyway.

Krishna

Re:Old DOS Stuff as well?

[Jacek Poplawski]

I am afaird dosemu is not perfect - I still can't play Duke Nukem 3D with sound.

Re:Old DOS Stuff as well?

[toxcspdrmn]

I have MSDOS 6.2 and Win 3.1 running in VMware express. No reason - I just thought I'd see if it worked. Seems to be fine.

Re:Old DOS Stuff as well?

[Vanders]

If all you want is DOS, get Bochs and install DOS on it. Bochs just emulates a full x86 CPU & hardware, but it will be plenty fast enough for DOS games. Hell you might even be able to use FreeDOS, which would make it absolutly no cost to you.

Re:Old DOS Stuff as well?

[unapersson]

There is a Sierra game interpreter in development for Linux, you should be able to find it somewhere on http://www.happypenguin.org/.

I've never tried it, having no Sierra games, but it may be worth a look.

Re:Old DOS Stuff as well?

[n1tr0g3n]

Check out FreeSCI. It runs Sierra games with better-than-original graphics on a multitude of platforms. If it was an AGI game, rather than SCI, check out Sarien. That is, if you ever see this post, considering how old the article is.

On the other hand...

[or_smth]

I know I am going to get beaten down by most people on slashdot for this, but this has been itching at me for some time.

It seems the major concern with the average (note: average) home user has with these emulators is if they can run windows games. Instead of even trying to run windows games under linux with the use of an emulator, why don't you just run linux with VMWare in windows 2000, and have true support for all the games you want to play, while keeping whatever linux "stuff" you need. It seems that there is no reason to go to linux just to run your windows games under an emulator, it strikes me as absolutely pointless.

Don't get me wrong here, I can see that a windows emulator for linux would be useful if you are working for a corperation, or your a coder, or have some other real business or purpose with linux, but it seems all the people who just go to linux because thats what everyone is talking about, only to run their windows things are just being plain stupid.

Re:On the other hand...

[richie123]

Ok, so what your saying is, windows users should fork over $300 bucks for windows 2000, then fork over another $200 for vmware, so they can run a free operating system.

It makes alot more sense to just dual-boot then that, or just play games that run on Linux.

Re:On the other hand...

[hexix]

Yeah I see your point, then they could even feel the joy of having to reboot every day.

Oh, I'm sorry, let's give windows 2000 some credit.

Every other day

No, it's not

[Anonymous Coward]

And here's why: The overwhelming majority of computer users in this world cou;dn't care less about the OS. All they care about is the apps that provide them with the entertainment or ability to work or whatever that enticed them to buy the computer in the first place. To these people the OS is nothing more than an evil necessity.

And please don't make the mistake of assuming that the apps on Linux are good enough. They're not, simply because even the ones do as much as the best of breed Windows apps are different, and therefore require a learning curve, something mainstream users detest. They don't want to learn about computers or OS's or even apps, they just want to do stuff with a computer. If you think this is short sighted and that people are being childish, well, you have a point. But that doesn't change the fact that that's how real people out in the real world view computers. The sooner fans of Linux and open source software realize that, the better.

Re:No, it's not

[Sonicboom]

"The overwhelming majority of computer users in this world cou;dn't care less about the OS. All they care about is the apps..."

"And please don't make the mistake of assuming that the apps on Linux are good enough. They're not, simply because even the ones do as much as the best of breed Windows apps are different, and therefore require a learning curve, something mainstream users detest. They don't want to learn about computers or OS's or even apps, they just want to do stuff with a computer."

Then why not just run MS Windows if that's the case???

Re:No, it's not

[Anonymous Coward]

oh GOD

Its hit him - freedom of choice - not a popular point of view on here

Shouldn't need windows...

[SmileyBen]

Apparently if 'Wine is not an emulator it shouldn't need Windows'. What?!? Because we so often want emulators that need the thing they're trying to emulate? There is a reason why Wine shouldn't need Windows - and that's because it's an alternative implementation of the Win32 API, and because that's what it's designed for.

I think the term 'Emulator' is slightly misleading for VMWare et al - I understand what, say, a Spectrum emulator is - it runs games written for a Speccie on a completely different system. Surely VMWare, which just runs Windows 'inside' other OSes is doing something different - after all you can run Windows on x86 hardware last time I looked.

Re:Shouldn't need windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare is more like WINE for hardware. It "emulates" devices, hardware memory management, etc.

Re:Shouldn't need windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

The *hardware* is emulated (virtualized) in VMWare. In a Windows guest session, the video is an emulated video card, the network is an emulated NE2000 or 3c509, or something, the sound is an emulated SB16, the BIOS is virtual, etc. The only thing that isn't is, well, the processor.

counter-strike

[gkuchta]

I can run counter-strike at 178fps in wine. I think that's pretty fucking amazing.

Re:counter-strike

[Anonymous Pancake]

must be hard playing counter-strike in a 160x120 window

WINE

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine sucks. Avoid it at all costs. I advise anyone working on this futile project to just give up and go code something useful.

wine is the best at what it does

[Ender Ryan]

Wine does what no other program does, it IS an implementation of windows that doesn't even require windows at all.

Not only that, but wine is currently the only way to run windows games in Linux fast and reliably. You can use it with OpenGL or Glide, and there is a version of wine maintained by Transgaming (I think it's Transgaming) that has some support for Direct3D.

Currently, I play the following Windows games IN LINUX, which only wine can do.

1. Star Trek Elite Force
2. Half Life - all of them, which is really 3 or 4 games..
3. Big Red Racing
4. Unreal - *which I just started playing natively in Linux using the UT engine
5. Solitare ; )
6. UltraHLE - I beat Wave Racer in Linux running UltraHLE ; ) an emulator running in a reverse implementation of windows, getting 2fsp higher than in windows
7. Deus Ex (which I am going to buy the Linux port of when it's released)
8. one or two more games that I no longer play...

* for anyone else who has done this, the trick to getting saved games working running in the UT engine is very simple, change the path separater in the SavePath to \ instead of /... retarded but it fixes the problem...

The point is

[dhammabum]

you can reboot the bloody win box with a click of the mouse button! Who cares about minimal performance gains when the system is crashing daily?

You can also easily back the things up and recover from crashes -- we use VMWare and the entire win system is just a large file. You can have a 'read-only' system, ie no changes are kept between reboots. This gives you a much more stable environment.

Over the last few years we've had legacy win apps that constantly crash with cc:mail routers the worst. We ran about 25 instances of these on four virtual machines. All we then need do is click on that friendly Power Off / Power On button.

It also lets you put all those crappy win apps that HR and marketing come up with on one box.

Because one is "free" all should be?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nuts, Dumass! You've got commie-thinking going on in that numbskull of yours.

Hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

Hogwash. You don't have a clue what you claim to. VMware does NOT run any x86 OS. It does not run in a self-contained window (whatever that means). The only CON in your STORY is you.

But do any of them run AOL underlinux

[-douggy]

See my pain @ http://www.dualsky.co.uk/art/aolinux.htm

You're excused.

[Chuck Chunder]

Isn't the whole idea of Linux to invent your own stuff

"Linux" isn't about inventing new stuff. It isn't about not inventing your own stuff. It's about doing whatever you want. It's about having choices. Different people want different things and will make different choices. No big deal.

As a sometimes web developer Apache and PHP on my Linux box are very handy. But it'd be nice to be able to check my pages in various flavours of IE without multiple PCs.

Be Very Afraid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Become paranoid, use SSH.

Why? Wine is a totally different beast.

[frleong]

Wine is a set of libraries that allows you to run Windows apps directly in the X-Window environment. This is completely different from emulators like VMWare et al that are basically Windows inside a window. Besides, Wine is also used to port Windows applications to Linux quickly, e.g. Corel WordPerfect.

In other words, it doesn't make sense comparing emulators to Wine, a development library. This is the same as comparing Allegro, SDL libraries to a SNES emulator.

they still forgot WABI :)

[unixman99]

It may only run win 3.1 apps but it was the best for it's time and still runs them well (and fast). There's a page dedicated to it at http://solarflow.dyndns.org/~wabi

Repeat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I have read the Wine article a while ago. Maybe ZDNet is recycling their stories, especially possible after the "distribution" lineup a little while ago. I've seen the Slackware article there before also. So maybe the *current* Wine is better.

One thing I dont get is...

[Auckerman]

Not being a PC person, spending my work day in a SGI/OS X enviroment and having OS X at home, I just don't understand something. On Mac's, Linux ships with Mac-on-Linux. The last I played with it was years ago (3-4?), but it worked. It worked well. I assume today it works near flawlessly. OS X runs OS 9 apps transparently at about 95% of their native speed. Now, what I don't get is why Linux on x86 does NOT have a GPL'ed envrioment that boots Windows inside of LInux at near full speed with no loss of compatibility (I mean even OS 9 apps in OS X "Blue Box" have access to OpenGL and Networking).

Re:One thing I dont get is...

[Kirkoff]

Take a look at plex86. It used to be called FreeMWare if that gives a hint.

Re:One thing I dont get is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not familiar with how Mac-on-Linux works, but one thing to note is that MacOS was designed to be virtualized by ripping out the bottom part and putting Unix underneath. (See A/UX.)

Re:One thing I dont get is...

[pantherace]

The program that is trying to do what OS X does for OS 9 programs is called WINE. Seriously, the idea is essentially the same. However, Apple had the source to OS 9 and if there were any undocumented things, they had what it did, and could replicate it.

Yes, Apple has so far done it better, but what they don't have is a corperation they are trying to emulate trying to make sure they don't succede.

Anything from pre-95 that I have tried works fine, and most things later work to a certain extent, sometimes even better than Windows itself.

Hello!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine sucks ASS!

I finally understand the trolls!

[alienmole]

There's no negative karma cap, right?! That means I would no longer be doomed to this boring existence in which my karma is nearly always 50! Woohoo!

What about bochs?

[jonestor]

http://bochs.sourceforge.net

It runs dos, linux, windows 95, 98 and NT. It is a little on the slow side but it works and is free.

No Win4Lin NSSE Review?

[SmilieZ]

I would have really liked to hear how Win4Lin
NSSE Would have gone.. (Thats the Multi user version of Win4lin)..

Oh well

Anthony

I beg to differ

[infiniti99]

VMware does NOT run any x86 OS

As another reply pointed out, OS/2 apparently doesn't run in VMWare. I really can't explain this because I don't use OS/2, but I would attempt to guess that OS/2 does some really wacky things. My PC's setup utility has an option that includes OS/2. It's the only OS-specific option in my entire BIOS menu! Can anyone shed some light on why OS/2 is "special" ?

Anyway, I would classify this as a hardware incompatibility, which is what I mentioned as a VMWare Con. And if OS/2 (or any similar non-working OS for VMWare) didn't exist, you could simply make a Linux bootdisk that crashes if USB is not found and call it an OS. Maybe I shouldn't have been so broad in a statement that could be voided so easily.

How about: VMWare will run anything x86 as long as it obeys VMWare's hardware/bios compatibilities.

It does not run in a self-contained window (whatever that means).

Funny how you should mention you don't know what I mean and yet still disagree with me at the same time. VMWare runs the VM session it its own window. Compared to WINE, this gives the effect of having your Windows applications self-contained in a single window.

Re:I beg to differ

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2 mode ... man, my IBM 486SLC2 has one of those settings. They weren't joking, either. You *HAD* to enable that to install OS/2 (Warp... been awhile) on the box.

Interestingly, the original SB Pro also would not work unless you enabled that mode. The AWE32 works just fine.

OS/2 mode "turns off most of the board" (as the guy at the computer store put it) and makes it run REALLY damned slow, even for a 486. These days, I'm not sure what it means.

Re:I beg to differ

[RichN]

Can anyone shed some light on why OS/2 is "special"?

To remain compatible with OS/2 v1.x (the older 16-bit version), the designers created a strict layout of the descriptor tables. That's why (up until I stopped using OS/2) an application couldn't use more than 512M of memory - the descriptor tables were completely used up by small-sized selectors at fixed addresses.

<speculation>
Maybe this layout doesn't leave enough LDTs or GDTs for VMWare to do its magic.
</speculation>

Re:I beg to differ

[Jenova]

Tried QNX too. No luck with VMware.

Wine is fast?

[glrotate]

If Wine is fast I'd hate to try slow!

What about the other way around?

[bullitB]

I don't know if anyone has tried it, but running the Windows version of VirtualPC from Connectix to run Linux has actually proved to be quite a bit better than the other way around...for me anyway...http://www.connectix.com/products/vpc4w.h tml

WINE -- my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what I've been able to run on WINE:

1. Solitaire and FreeCell. Getting these to work is a no-brainer.

2. M$ Excel 95 and Bookshelf 95. The former with a few problems, the latter (though I almost never use it) flawlessly.

3. Almanac, a shareware program.

4. SkyMap, another shareware program.

5. Windows version of GNU Chess -- I know, pointless exercise, except as another test case.

6. Perhaps the most important Windows app of all, Quicken 2000. I've just experimented with this a little bit so far: not quite ready to trust all my data to it but at least the "Quick Entry" feature works smoothly. Intuit still hasn't promised a Linux port of Quicken so this is important.

I've never had M$ Word or PowerPoint running past the splash screen on WINE, but the M$ Office programs are becoming irrelevant (to me at least). Other failures include Seiko Smart Label Printer, Alta Vista Tunnel, and Programmer's File Editor.

Apps are noticeably slower in loading than in their native environment but once loaded they seem to execute as quickly or even more quickly.

I'd say WINE has about a year to go before it's Ready for Prime Time. Unfortunately, that's what I'd have said a year ago, too.

Easy. WINE!

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectX? Try WINE!
WINE implements directx. If you get transgaming wine from http://transgaming.com/ (try the CVS server) you can even get D3D on OpenGL too!

WINE status link

[Anonymous Coward]

The following link provides a pretty good picture of the current state of WINE:

http://www.winehq.com/News/status.html

Best "X Term" for Windows

[meekjt]

Putty is the best program I know of to connect to a remote computer using ssh/telnet from Windows. Its free too!

Check it out here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Re:Best "X Term" for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out SecureCRT.

Stallman

[heffrey]

Wine is not an emulator. Aside from creating one of those recursive Linux acronyms

The good Mr. Stallman will love that....

Why??

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another story that 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of computer users care about.

I did 3 of them, but stayed with VMware

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past I tried Wine, Win4Lin and VMware to run W9X applications under Linux.

Wine: some applications don't even install, parallel port dongle's are a nono.

Win$Lin: the nessesary patches in the kernel tree caused my DOSEMU (DPMI) applicataions to crash.

VMware: albeit a little slower it runs all my app's, with dongle and modem. The suspend and resume modus are really neat.

Kees

http://www.rdesktop.org/

[sidetrack]

http://www.rdesktop.org/

We use rdesktop with w2k server, it definitely wins (sic) for us on ease of managment - just one Windows install for multiple users. We also tried VMWare, and Win4lin. It's also usable for off-site Windows access with X11 tunneled over ssh.

Unfortunately, rdesktop only really works with the windows desktop in 256 colours at the moment, and there's no cut and paste yet, but it is improving, and certainly beats metaframe on cost....

I might have gone for VMWare lite (or whatever they call it), but we happened to have an unused w2k server license lying about (an Exchange Server that didn't last long after I started working here ;-) ), so that was most of the cost already taken care of.

There's even a debian package for rdesktop (with the patches to get it to work with w2k) in Sid...

they didn't know what they were talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

WinE is still a work in progress. They used a pre-packaged rpm (which is not as good as from source). They tried to run heavy-duty programs which don't work in Linux... if anything, MS Office was probably designed with not letting WinE run it in mind.
In short, WinE can do alot. But you can't do much unless you are knowledgable enough to know what a .dll is and how to compile source code.

snapshots

[tamboril]

Emulators are good in a SQE environment where you can set up a test scenario where a failure occurs, then snapshot the whole damn machine, send it to the developer, and say, "look, press enter and see the crash for yourself!".

Small Distribs

[jawtheshark]

There are numerous small distributions. The one I use, because I'm bandwith-challenged too (single-line-ISDN) is Peanut Linux . It's a fine distribution including KDE2 with KOffice. The installation is a bit harder than mainstream SuSE or Redhat, but it guides you quite well by giving the commands to type or simple text-menu's. This together with a bit common sense is enough. (Well, installing on an ext2 partition requires you to know about mke2fs *grin*)

I personally would like to migrate to Slackware or Debian because I'd like to configure my system to my needs. Peanut comes "as-is", which is not a bad thing for starting of with Linux, IMHO. I started downloading Slack 8.0 once, but 600Meg is indeed just too much for my slow connection :-(

Oh, and for the "programming-own-drivers" part: I never touched a driver in my life and everything seems to work quite well for me. The only thing that was a bit harder was to make a weird (actually, just uncommon) SCSI PCMCIA card run. I once stated that problem in a comment on /. (while staying ontopic) and someone promptly redirected me to a site which had the info required to make it run.

simple...

[Anonymous Coward]

preserve uptime!!!

btw i used to have 3 pcs just for doing that, nothing fancy, then i needed some money and damn i hate to reboot

Re:Win2Net but not Tarantella??

[Anonymous Coward]

And no mention of Tarantella. It seems that if they were using Enterprise-class apps, they should have included it. The review seemed like a promotion for VMware (two products reviewed). Hmmm.

good call.

[bored]

This is almost exactly what I'm doing. Two boxes. One running Windows with exceed and the other running linux. That way I have everything running at full (ok some linux apps suck over 100base) speed. The windows box is my main desktop since it has better hardware support. In particular multiple head support with the ability to easily drag windows between the heads. Combine that with the with a software IDE raid config exporting SMB shares and everything is just dandy. I host the linux applications from exceed. M$ word and Kword running in two windows next to each other is cute. I could try the linux box as my desktop box and run VNC on windows, but that isn't nearly as elegant a solution.

dual-boot

[arete]

The obvious answer for what you need, imo, is to dual-boot your machine. No speed hit in his games, no expensive laggy emulator.

There are plenty of reasons to do what this article is about, but letting your son play games is more easily solved by dual-booting - AND everything'll run faster.

- Arete

Re:dual-boot

[Rick the Red]

Dual-booting wouldn't help. I didn't get into details, but his PC is on the 2nd floor, and I wanted to use it to host the 802.11b card, which would require Linux on that box, full-time. The only other Linux boxes are in the basement, and my laptop, but the laptop can't act as the 802.11b access point! Don't even think about suggesting Windows is good enough for that application -- I'm not stupid enough to allow anyone in the neighborhood onto our LAN.

After reading the comments here it looks like I'll need two PCs on the 2nd floor, one with Windows for my son, and one with Linux for the 802.11b card.

Meanwhile, I've discovered this site, which encourages me to give him Linux as well as Windows. So I'll run one of the several suggested X-terminals on his PC and host his Linux stuff on another box.

Some Linux sites for you

[Anonymous Coward]

www.linuxiso.org ISO images of install CDs for various distributions
www.linuxnewbies.org A good start in Linux
www.linuxdoc.org The Linux Documentation Project


As for writing your own drivers, you probably won't need to do that... unless you have something really specialized or something you purchased on Mars. If the drivers for the device didn't come with whatever distribution you choose, you can probably find somewhere on the web where someone else needed to use that same device under Linux and has already written a driver for it (which you can just download and install).

Finally, for your first time in Linux you might want to go out and buy distribution CDs rather than download. This gets you three benefits: No waiting for your 56k modem to disconnect you 498 megs into the download (I think this must be part of Murphy's law), dead tree manuals (You can probably find everything you need online, but there is something comforting about documentation that you can still get to even if you mess up the computer), and support (many distributions have tech support offerings).

Have fun and good luck!

Re:dual-boot - I suspect you're not still reading

[arete]

I suspect you're not still reading this (I make a habit of checking for replies to my posts)

But I certainly would recommend 2 boxen for that purpose, anyway. In fact, I would recommend giving him a dual-booting fast (all relative, of course) and leave an older computer as just a router. Much more secure than running a bunch of other junk on a router at all - it should JUST be a router.

For that purpose, I suspect something like a 486dx25 w/ 16 MB of RAM is sufficient. That what I normally end up with in a surplus router...
(go with more ram if you've got it, but it's not essential.) Of course, I'm only pumping DSL with it, so I'm topped at 1.5 if I'm lucky. But the only real downside is the relatively minor power requirements.