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Windows Compatability on the Linux Desktop
davecb writes "O'Reilly has been kind enough to publish one of my
how-to articles,
Windows Compatability for the Linux Desktop, about dealing with that 'one last annoying program
than only runs on Windows'. The answer? Run it under Linux and win4lin, and never venture onto the Windows desktop at all. Especially don't run programs via dual-boot, which tempts you to stay and use all those other wonderful programs like Outlook...
How about linux comes out with a standard toolkit such as apple's cocoa, which allows spell check on every form element.
You should try OpenOffice (see http://www.openoffice.org/). To keep it brief, it's like an open-source version of MS Office -- and it includes spell check.
- shadowmatter
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
To get a spell checker in Linux, there is open office, Abi Word (both of which do red squigglies below misspelled words), and one can always type in "ispell -a" at the shell prompt and start typing in words which they're not sure of the spelling of.
I've been playing around with several different solutions for this. Personally I have no need for any of them except when coding microcontrollers at my robotic's competition once a year or so, in which case I just use some makefiles that act as the interface and run the compiler with wine for me. It worked totally fine.
Other than wine however, QEmu (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) is a nice speed driven emulator that will do full on emulation of a system. It recently became able to emulate a system well enough to install and use all versions of windows up through XP. Quite a neat thing actually. It's much faster than boches, which I've also tried, and it has a fairly complete feature set. (Though obviously is for a slightly different purpose than boches, as boches is being mostly used as an operating system development tool now.)
Wine, WineX and Crossover all also work for even faster results but of course don't emulate the entire system. The apps integrate better of course though, due to the fact that wine will go ahead and put it on your desktop for you so you don't have to know the difference.
I touch computers in naughty places
WINE wouldn't support MS Project, which was specifically what the author was trying to run.
licet differant, aequabitur
Especially don't run programs via dual-boot, which tempts you to stay and use all those other wonderful programs like Outlook
Because we know linux users must only use linux. Nothing else!
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
It is spelt "compatibility" for crying out loud !
And it is repeated both in the article AND in the slashdot title. Unacceptable...
Where the hell did this weird "compatability" mistake come from anyway ? I see it more and more everywhere, even in important reports and it's driving me crazy.
Music is the language of the heart, the sound of the soul. -Joe Satriani
If Linux had a sync option with iPaq PDAs i wold go with Linux. Please cant i have this.
And yes, Linux is ready for the desktop. I switched my own firm PC to Debian/testing last October and I use it for the daily work stuff without any problems. Even being a small island in a Windows-focussed infrastructure doesn't give much trouble.
The trick is not to try to be a 100% compatible to Windows. No, I rather prefer to be compatible to open standards and so I'm sharing my documents not in *.DOC files but in *.PDF and originally they are written with LaTeX. You can't convince a bean counter that switching makes sense if you just want to do the things the same way like before, because then nobody sees some "added value". If you do things different and even more successful then people start to think about the why...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
man... I was stupid enough to have a look at extreme wookie love.. thats gross!!!>..
WINE can do Winzip perfectly, but it's the games and the ease of use that keep me on windows.
With Windows at least all my hardware is detected. Sure it doesn't perform the greatest under bloated XP, but it works... which is better than it not working at all under linux (and by the time it gets supported it's several years down the track)
Windows installs things really easily. Linux on the other hand can be a total NIGHTMARE when it comes to installation... I must admit that some installs on linux are a dream.... just a shell script does the job. As for having to compile source code for most of the other stuff???? you need to have a good distro or you will spend a whole day compiling something... only to have some library missing or the code breaking and not working for some inexplicable reason. Then Fedora won't let me install the KDE development packages due to some bug there. Heck I just compiled a 2.6.7 kernel today and some modules barfed on install to the point where I had no modules.dep file to mkinitrd with! I still don't understand why!
On security fronts Linux wins HANDS DOWN. Windows forces you to buy stuff from Symantec, when a free IPTABLES script from the net can do the same job on Linux for free. And linux viruses are almost non-existant.
The day when Linux takes over the desktop can't come soon enough... but at the moment its capabilities are pretty limited to being an alternate email/internet/office/server replacement... but not much else.
WINE is getting better but it's still jagged in places. Still pretty unusable for me. It gets some business Windows apps going, but as Linux apps get better to replace them, I hope WINE will eventually be used as a front end just for old windows games.
Sure linux is free.... but that doesn't help someone like me who shelled out on Windows only because Linux and WINE isn't really there yet.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
yes the java client is supported in Linux, also there are a couple of other clients that work, look at http://meanwhile.sourceforge.net and also this plugin for trillian. http://sourceforge.net/projects/stplugin. IBM community tools http://community.ngi.ibm.com/ also works on Linux and that is Sametime under the covers. You should be able to point the buddy list at any sametime server, by default it points to an IBM public sametime server at messaging.ngi.ibm.com The Lotus notes client also is a sametime client. I haven't got awareness working under Linux+WINE yet but I haven't tried that hard. There are a couple of other java clients people have written but if you want a C app I guess the meanwhile source would be a good start.
WineX or if you're talking about old Warcraft DosBox.
www.transgaming.com
They are doing almost exactly that, reimplementing DX9 to Linux, with a fair degree of success. KOTOR, Max Payne to name 2.
if you had a choice - either buy some crappy p100/32 _and_ a windows licence OR that your shiny new XXGhz - without windows - which one would you choose ? of course, pirating could help you have both, but it's not that fun when somebody actually takes away your computer and you have to pay fine ;)
don't dismiss price as insignificant factor just because you can easily afford buying windows. not everybody can - and there are people who prefer spending that money on something more useful.
Rich
Without attempting to go off on a Stallman-esque rant, "proprietary" and "free as in speech" are contradictions in terms. The software *is* "free as in beer", but without the source code and permission to modify and redistribute it, it cannot be considered to be free software.
Absolutely no-one - but then that's the type of question I expect to be asked by somebody who doesn't fully understand what the Open Source model is.
The fact is that Linux has already denied Microsoft a substantial share of the server market & is starting to eat into the desktop space. Despite the backing of the likes of IBM, it has not done this through clever marketing and advertising campaigns but because the word has been getting out of a viable alternative to Windows that people have tried and liked. There will never be a "mass conversion to Linux" because in the corporate environment, these decisions are made on purely financial benefits.
However, as MS increases its Windows licensing costs, as Windows suffers more and more from downtime as a result of worms and viruses, the cost of running Windows is getting more expensive as time goes on.
I myself am in a customer-facing support role and deal with a lot of IT departments in big corporations and have been doing so for something like 20 years now.
Five years ago, I would never have seen a Linux server in any of these locations but these days, there is always at least one SuSE or RedHat box on a desk or in a server room.
This in turn means that those same companies already have people capable of administering and maintaining those servers (many of these customers are big financial institutions with incredibly restrictive security policies in place). Those admins, in turn, can educate others.
The fact is that the uptake of Linux will continue but will be at a relatively slow rate - but then, nobody in the community (apart from the zealots) really care about that unless it's because demand for Linux knowledge increases and so salaries get even higher (we may be "eggheads" but we still like our fat salaries!)
Take your head out of the sand and just accept that it is happening, albeit at a slow rate...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Your story works 2 ways. Hooray for you if you think Windows covers your needs. Other people feel the same way about Linux (fashionable or not) or OSX et.al. Just because Windows covers your needs doesn't mean that is true for everyone (and vice-versa).
The article says even though MS Project runs only on Windows.
Actually I think you all will find that MS Project does run under Codeweaver's WINE, see MS Project is there on the list. It's got a Bronze on the Supported Applications list too, up there with Outlook XP which also has a Bronze (and that runs very smoothly on my PC).
The author also writes With this, I can have my "must-have" programs: MS Project and Visio.
Well, with Crossover you can have both Visio 2000 and Project. The question is, which one would you spend money on, $89.99 for Win4Lin (slower) or $39.95 for Crossover (faster).
Actually, I believe it should have been stated before, but I'll repeat myself from an earlier posting some time ago.
The new Crossover Office does really run Microsoft Project and does this flawlessly. I wish it could run Rational Rose as well, but since we weren't able to force the poor emu-layer to do so, we decided to evaluate Borland Together which is cross-platform by nature. Up until now, it manages just fine and even better, since it integrates with StarTeam really smoothly.
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On Slashdot, Russians comment on YOU!
JBuilder and Eclipse.
There are numerous other IDE's for other languages for Linux as well.
One Word
VMWARE
It runs everything. It's a completely emulated computer. You install windows on the emulated computer and everything works perfectly. I even used this to make my scanner work under linux before drivers were available. The only thing that won't work is games, because emulating a good video card is just too hard.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Try GNUstep - http://www.gnustep.org - it is kind-of-compatible with Cocoa, runs on many platforms and can do spellchceking for every editable text, including textfields.
Not all programs run in win4lin. In particular, Pro-Engineer 2001, and Wildfire, refuse to run on my machine, I believe because they have a lot of underlying platform and machine specific code.
:(. That means that for that program, I and other mechanical engineers are stuck dual-booting.
Unfortunately, I've read elsewhere that PTS is refusing to make a linux version
You make some good points, I reply I would say that I am happy in running Linux in a corporate environment and find it far superior to Windows for what should be Windows strengths, office productivity applications.
To answer your points
i) Stability.
Here is the uptime from my PC from a few months ago (running SuSE 7.1)
alistair@omlette:~> uptime
5:31pm up 393 days, 2:06, 9 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
I have an XP machine and it doesn't come close to these figures, it still seems to have Virtual Memory problems from time to time.
Sound works excellently for me, and I have two large LCD screens running flawlessly from my Matrox card, dual head actually being easier to set up and tune in KDE / X than Windows XP.
Open Office has come on laps and bounds recently, I have over 250 Powerpoint presentations on this PC and they all open flawlessly these days using OO 1.1.1. I actually prefer OO Writer and Presenter to the MS equivelent these days, only Excel is clearly better.
I use Mozilla for mail and web browsing, it often goes for 30 - 40 days between restarts. I currently have 744 emails on my IMAP server and 27,000 emails (3 years worth) in my local folders and Mozilla indexes and searches then very fast on this average PC.
Upgrading to SuSE 9.1 took me under 3 hours and I have done very little upgrading since. However, bear in mind that before that I had the 400 day uptime, and before that 293 days uptime and think about all the time saved by rebooting the PC once a year on average and you'll see where the performance benefits come from.
There are many more benefits but I'll finish with just one.
I use a Mac at home and Linux on the laptop when travelling. Often I will be called on to find an email thread from 18 months earlier. All I have to do now is connect to the corporate network, ssh into my PC and X back Mozilla, 3 years of work history are now in front of me, this has saved so much time on more occasions than I can remember.
I am certainly no longer a geek and wouldn't say Linux is the solution to everything, however in my corporate role involving email, web sites documents and powerpoint I would estimate I am 10 - 20% more productive using a Standard SuSE Linux build than if I used the Windows XP Microsoft Office equivelent, but as I said, your mileage may vary.
Win4Lin runs DOS apps through to WinME. I saw them at the Desktop Linux Summit and the said that they will have a Win2000 beta in October and GA by end of the year.
And on the memory, the virtual memory goes up to 2GB.
The sad truth is that Linux is not taken seriously for audio work at the moment, even though the ALSA system is quite excellent and the latency of 1.x is lower than both Windows and OSX.
You won't find a driver for that hardware, since it uses a special inteface and special software that is closed source. Yamaha has no interest in writing that software for Linux.
On the other hand, it's such an obscure device, it's not really a priority for most people. Windows and OSX are the best solutions for people like you, that need specialized support for music hardware and software (for the time being).
1) Is it *really* more stable? How often can you *really* get the BSOD to come up in XP? I haven't managed yet. Can you get the uptime I've experienced with Windows on Linux? Probably. Can you get the same uptime and still have sound support? Maybe. Can you do it with the grand total of around 2 hours of configuration necessary?
/etc/modules
Back in 2001, the last time I used windows, it was on an old Compaq Armada 1592dt, a fairly run-of-the-mill PC laptop with APM and no ACPI, I would switch IPs regularly, and sometimes frequently, as well as switching between a Xircom Realport and Cisco 802.11b wireless card several times a day. This was all part of my job, the computer was used for troubleshooting and configuring high end networking equipment.
Windows 2000 would frequently lock-up completely when inserting a new PC card, and/or get confused about networking settings until I rebooted.
Sometimes the problem was so bad I had to remove the drivers and all related registry settings before I could get the cards to work again.
I switched to Debian Linux, and after setting up the drivers the problems were gone. It was very difficult and sometimes impossible to do my job with Win2k, and easily possible with Linux.
2) Is it *really* more secure, or does it just invite fewer attacks? Yes, I know Outlook is terrible, but that's not the actual Windows OS, nor does it need to be installed.
Windows ships with a bunch of services installed and listening for connections by default, Debian installed with ports open at all. I'd rank that as being infinitely more secure.
3) Is all the extra aggravation *really* worth it? Yeah, you're extra cool for running Linux and you're sticking it to the man, but why?
In my case, it had nothing to do with being "cool" and everything to do with getting my job done. It's supremely arrogant of you to assume that you know anyone else's motivations for choosing software. In my line of work, it is certainly not strange to find people who prefer, or even need to use some kind of UNIX for their workstation OS, and it has nothing to do with being 31337 like you seem suggest is everyone's motivation. You need to get out more if you think Windows can do it all.
In my case, as I said earlier I was unhappy with Windows 2000 because of it's apparent problems with changing hardware and networking settings. Secondly, having installed all the relevant drivers from Compaq, I also wasn't happy with the amount of time the computer took to wake-up and sleep using the APM BIOS (about 30 seconds to sleep and 30-40 to wake in Win2k). In Linux, I was able to tweak the settings and move much of the APM subsystem into a RAM disk to streamline the process, and prevent having to wait for the disk to spin up, I was able to shorten the sleep time to around 10 seconds and wake-up time to less than 5 in Linux - that would not be possible in Windows. Stability problems I had experienced in Windows related to APM sleep/wake-up also disappeared when I switched to Linux. I was able to use tools in Linux that were not available in Windows that worked at the ethernet rather than TCP/IP level and I was able to change my MAC address without needing to use promiscuous mode, these were both very valuable features.
Finally, having been UNIX obsessed since a young age, I was familiar with many UNIX type operating systems including Debian Linux prior to installing it on the laptop. So it was a departure from normality for me to be using windows at all, but I decided to do so because it was pre-installed on the laptop, and I was not convinced that Linux would be better for portable hardware.
Incidentally, setting up sound on the laptop (as with most systems) was a matter of typing one command.
echo "sb" >
V.S. DOES have the niftiest GUI designed I've ever seen. I was very disappointed that I liked it so much. The "anchoring" of widgets so that you don't have to write window resizing code it great.
Borland's Delphi and C++Builder had this feature years before it showed up in Visual Studio.
In fact, most of the niftiest features in Microsoft's developer tools are based on concepts developed by Borland, just as C# takes many of its best ideas from Delphi (just applying them to a C++ base rather than Pascal). This probably has something to do with Microsoft's widely publicised poaching of Borland's developers.
Now, I'll concede that the mere fact that MS didn't invent these features doesn't lessen the quality of their implementation. Just don't give them too much credit for innovation - the greatest talent MS has always shown has been in buying and marketing other people's ideas. (Again, allow me to emphasise that I'm not trolling here: that isn't necessarily a bad thing, marketers are just as essential to a product's success as engineers.)
With the latest release of Crossover Office, I've been able to run the three gotta-have Doze apps for my work: Sametime, Visio & MS-Project.
Gotta check that Meanwhile option, though, for one less app that I need it for; thanks for the pointer..
http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/
Project sucks rocks anyhow, I found several web based project management tools were better, and made it much easier for multiple people to co-ordinate on a project without having to be all around at the same time.
And solarwinds toolkit only exists because windows lacks these basic tools. Everything it does is easily handled by unix apps, just check out the ports tree some time.
enable autochecking on open office. or koffice (IIRC - i cant be arsed checking). i think abiword has this too.
Right now Quicken doesn't run on Linux. I've been using that for years and don't feel like changing to something that is less capable. Plus I don't want to have to port over years worth of data. In addition, the games for the kids only come with Windows versions. Also a must have. No Linux versions of educational games. If this helps and works. More power to it. Cheers
Photoshop 7 runs pretty well under Crossover Office 3. You can read up a little here. I don't think any of the other heavy hitters you mentioned are tested under Crossover yet. Personally, I'm sticking with dual-boot until Photoshop runs perfectly. And as far-fetched as that may be, I think the idea of perfectly running all of your listed programs under any kind of emulation is a huge longshot.
Ahem, 4 insightful for having no clue that both Nvidia and ATI have started providing Linux drivers for quite some time? That Matrox is supported by MESA's own drivers? That UT, UT2003, UT2004, America's Army and all id games have been ported to Linux? That there even are open source high-res OpenGL versions of Doom for Linux (and Windows) even though the original Doom used 8-bit 320x200 software rendering)? Well, ok...
As for DirectX being ported to Linux, winex is doing this, but for native apps developers can simply use SDL and write games that are 100% portable across an incredible range of OSes.
I love C++