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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...
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
___
On Slashdot, Russians comment on YOU!
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.
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.
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).