The Answer Guy

Win4Lin's Limitations: VMWare's Strength?

From Charles Hethcoat on Thu, 04 May 2000

I was excited to find out about Win4Lin and went straight to their web page for more details. There I read that they only work with Windows 95 and 98. They explain why in their white paper, and the reasoning is, well, reasonable. But I don't think I will be able to use Win4Lin where I work. Here's why.

My company sees to it that my computer runs NT. This was done because NT is far more stable than 9X. Not perfect, but pretty stable. But I would much prefer to use Linux, and I do have Debian installed on my computer. I boot it via a boot disk, and don't fool with lilo.

Since I don't have Windows 95, I can't use Win4Lin. Pity. I could make good use of it. I wonder how many other people are in my position?

Charles Hethcoat

Try VMware (http://www.vmware.com) instead. It does run a full hardware system emulation and can run NT. It can even run a copy of Linux under Linux or Linux under NT (though that seems like a horrible waste).

You might also watch the free virtual machine project (which is not ready for production time) called Plex86 (at http://www.freemware.org). That's based on the work of Kevin Lawton (Bochs) and is apparently now sponsored by Mandrakesoft (http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en).

Of course there's still WINE (http://www.winehq.com). That will run some of your MS Windows applications natively under Linux. There's also still the opportunity to access some of your applications remotely through VNC. You'd run the VNC server on one of your (other) NT systems and access it via the Linux native VNC client (or the Java client, if you really wanted to).

Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 54 June 2000

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