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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...
Why spend all that time developing a program that emulates Microsoft Windows products, when they could just devlop a better solution to the software they want to run? I mean, come on people, mIRC, Outlook, AIM, Comet Curson... they're not all that great to begin with.
Nice article, I have installed and run Linux a few times so I have a feel for it. (Redhat and Mandrake, I loved Mandrake!) The very steps you articulate are so over my head even though you seem to be creating a rosetta stone for others to follow.
Give me DoomIII on Linux and I might switch now.
Give you guys about three years and Microsoft is going to feel the pain to the point they are going to be forced to offer concessions.
I think that day is coming sooner than we think.
Some of us don't have that luxury. Outlook and Office are STILL the main things keeping me on Windows. Oh, just use thunderbird, or some such thing... Well, I'd love to, but the company I work for uses Exchange. Oh, well just use Evolution or Kontact! Tried both. While I was able to get them to connect to our servers and send and receive mail, the addressing needs serious work. There's something like 80,000 employees in the company -- adding these one by one into Kontact's address book, or Evolution's address book, or even Thunderbird's address book (when using IMAP) is a major pain. Sure, I don't need to import 80,000 addresses. I need to import several hundred. One by one. By first searching through a list 80,000 names long. The name search feature in Outlook is far and above anything I've seen in any exchange client in Linux. Oh, and why do I have to "import" anything? Why can't I just use the entirety of the company directory AS my address book?? That, and the fact that I need Visio (sorry, Kivio doesn't cut it.) and while OpenOffice works fine for simple docs, I spend most of my time in a word processor working with company templates, most of which include formatting and macros that DO NOT work in OpenOffice. Oh yeah, I'll need a copy of Visual Studio (yes, we are trying to go Java... we just need to kill off these F*@!*#$ vb apps first...) ...and some of the corporate benefits web pages only work in internet exploader. So, until there are open source apps that REALLY are able to replace office, I'll be stuck in some sort of hyrbrid world. (not to mention all of the company-specific Windows-only apps like: the timecard system, the purchasing system, the travel system, and, oh, I almost forgot about MS Project....)
My solution? A dual-head box running SuSE 9.0 with Windows stuffed into a vmware box completely covering one monitor. Have to use Windows? Drag the mouse to the right. Get to use Linux? Drag the mouse to the left. Works great. When Windows needs to reboot, it can do so without interrupting my telnet/ssh sessions, XMMS player, Mozilla windows, etc. I only reboot the Linux box when I need to update the kernel. The strange thing? XP actually boots FASTER inside vmware. Just be sure to feed it LOTS of memory.
Ok, here's my situation:
At work, we have 4 desktop machines running Windows 98, and a file/print/web server running Linux. The Windows machines were purchased years ago, they're cyrix 686 machines running at 200mhz, with 32-64mb of ram. All up, we spent about $5000 or $6000 on hardware way back when, exluding the server - which was a P90 with 16 megs of ram.
The people I work with don't like computers. The existing machines are 'good enough' for the job, and that's that. So, under what circumstances do I buy and install Windows XP on these machines? Or indeed, upgrade them in any way?
I bought a new PC (wow) as a server - an Athlon 2500+ with 512 megs of ram and a 20gb hard drive. The goal was to have all the old clunkers running as LTSP terminals so that they would operate a lot faster - and about a week after I'd got things set up, one of the machines had a hard drive failure. One by one, I've swapped the rest of the machines onto Linux via LTSP, and despite some fun and games it's been smooth sailing since.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
I'll try to answer this from my own experience:
1. Is it really more stable? Sure has been for me (though I don't run XP... I've got a bit of a beef with their "Product Activation," since I change out hardware almost as often as I change my socks).
2. More secure? Oh yes... I'd say definitely fewer attacks. You can argue whether there's a selection bias with the number of windows systems out there, but the vast numbers of attacks/viruses/worms still stands. Besides, even if some 1337 linux worm comes along and compromises your unpriviliged user account, so what?
3. Aggravation? What aggravation? I've got a bunch of neighbors, friends, and family members running redhat and mandrake linux. Setup these days is no problem... and once installed and configured, you don't have to do too terribly much.
I don't think linux is perfect for everyone either... but the look of wonder on a win98 or winME user's face once they start using a nice KDE desktop under Mandrake warms my heart, particularly once they find out that they don't have to sweat the lastest windows Worm-du-jour.
After I've rescued/recovered someone's hosed windows system a few times, they always ask me what I use. I hand them a knoppix CD, tell them to try it out for a few days, and let me know if they're interested. You'd be surprised what an eye-opening experience that is for many windows users...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Two computers? One Linux, One Windows. Don't start me on WINE and all this stuff. I KNOW. I was using Linux only for about a year but there is one simple point that cannot be ignored, if you still play games you still need windows. It is better to have two machines, less rebooting back and forth and you can always remote X into the linux one or KVM or whatever you choice would be. I recommend two computers for all homes...especially when you play enough games to make it matter.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Actually, I`ve tried Newteks Lightwave (latest version) and it works, BUT: not in a... ahem... "lawful" way. Its protection crashes under WINE, so you have to find "a way to bypass it". After that, its not only usable, its actually faster than the same frickin version running under windows!!! From what I`m guessing, it has to do not only with lesser bloatware in my Gentoo dist, but with native, fast support for OpenGL in the desktop (the preview windows are blazingly fast compared to running it under Windows).
Keeping in mind that I`m a newbie, don`t know hell about linux (not even what are or how to create symlinks - what the heck are these?) I`m guessing that WINE might just be able to run your Max with no problems! Give it a try, you ain`t got anything to lose but some of your time!