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:

[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:

[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:

[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:

[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:

[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:

[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:Hmmm

[Danse]

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

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

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).

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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 ?

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..

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..

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.

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: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.

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: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..

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.

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.

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?

[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.

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.

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...

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.

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: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.

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.

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:Plex86

[Micah]

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

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

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.

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.

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.