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Win4Lin 5.0 Reviewed

Posted by michael on from the necessity-calls dept.

uninet writes "About a month ago, NeTraverse contacted OfB Labs with an early release copy of Win4Lin 5.0, the follow-up to the already impressive Win4Lin 4.0 released in May 2002. Win4Lin, for those not familiar with it, offers near-native (or better) speed "virtualization" of a Windows box so that one can run Windows 9x (95/98/Me) inside GNU/Linux."

5 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. No 3D? by Erwos · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm willing to pay for one of these windows-emulation packages when they finally get some 3D going, which is why I _really_ want Windows at this point. What's stopping them from doing this?

    -Erwos

    --
    Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
  2. Toughest? by rwiedower · · Score: 3, Interesting

    one of the toughest challenges a piece of software ever faces, the upgrade installation mode

    I can think of several stress filled things a program may have to do. I'm not sure the upgrade installation mode ranks as the "toughest". Maybe it's difficult to get perfect...

  3. Re:I fail to understand by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Interesting
    yet you think it's unreasonable for people to criticize these coders who blatantly copy Windows

    What coders who copy Windows? You do realize that to install Win4Lin, you need to already own a Win9X CD. You go through the entire Windows installation process, including loading the Windows CD and typing in a valid product ID code. An entire standard Win9X installation is created on your PC, it just happens to live in a Linux file system.

    Funny that you bring up SCO. Win4Lin is based on a DOS-virtualization technology called "merge" that SCO has also used. Here is a summary I found of its very convoluted history. (Google cache; real page is broken.)

  4. Poppycock by delphi125 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    First you say 'direct access' then you immediately follow it with 'drivers'. Which is it?

    Almost all (Windows) 3D nowadays is either DirectX or OpenGL. I'll ignore the former for a moment and stick to OpenGL. How hard can it be to 'emulate' a glVertex3f call? Ok, I'm not saying it is trivial, but it must be a lot easier than the average Win32 API call. I mean, the function already exists anywhere you have OpenGL.

    Back to DirectX or rather Direct3D... although this uses COM interfaces, the functions available are pretty similar to those in OpenGL. Now there will be a number of 'slow' functions (loading a large texture), but these will always be slow. A little more overhead won't make a huge difference. There are only a few functions (vertex, texture coordinates, normals etc) which get called really often. It is here that optimization efforts should be directed. Not easy, but should be easier than the entire Win API.

    I will admit to ignoring the problems of X being a network protocol rather than a graphics one. I suspect that to reach optimal frame rates you wouldn't want to run DirextX games in an X window on another terminal over the network. But unix has always done well at allowing multiple 'terminals', so do it that way.

  5. Re:Check out transgaming - was "No 3D?" by ukyoCE · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Some trolls have been astroturfing saying that emulation is a bad idea and will prevent anything from ever going native.

    This would be bad because emulation is almost universally slower and more buggy.

    I think that proves it right there - emulation will create a market willing to buy the faster and less buggy linux version. WineX will tide us over only until our numbers are large enough to demand native linux apps.

    Besides, emulation is important for legacy applications+games. I really don't think Blizzard is going to go back and make Warcraft2 for linux, but I got to play through it again on linux using Wine.