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Windows Compatability on the Linux Desktop

Posted by michael on from the avoiding-temptation dept.

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...

5 of 626 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hmm by aka-ed · · Score: 5, Informative
    RTA, and you'll see its intended for office environments where rebooting dual boot systems are a loss of productivity/time.

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    I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
  2. Wine or Qemu by djcapelis · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    I touch computers in naughty places
  3. Re:Other Soloutions... by Rudisaurus · · Score: 5, Informative

    WINE wouldn't support MS Project, which was specifically what the author was trying to run.

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    licet differant, aequabitur
  4. The table of equivalents by Advocadus+Diaboli · · Score: 5, Informative
    The table of equivalents lists a lot of open source solutions for almost every program that you can get for Windows. So if someone wants to switch to Open Source he should have a look at it.

    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...

  5. Re:Chasing the Windows Rainbow... by XeRXeS-TCN · · Score: 5, Informative
    "AIM, while proprietary, is free as in both beer and speech for the time being..."

    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.