On Monday 02 September 2002 23:24, Jeric wrote:
Hi, What is the difference between wine and wineX?
As Quinton said, WineX is targeted at games and Wine at applications. I generally use just WineX on my machine for the Windows applications I want to run. It doesn't work for all apps, just like vanilla Wine doesn't work for all apps, but in my experience, WineX works for more applications than Wine. In vanilla Wine you will probably have trouble with the installers for each SW package. WineX has some extra tweaks (beyond just the DirectX wrapper) so that more of the installer applications will actually start up and do their thing. For gaming WineX works great... except... not every game works, and it laggs behind the releases of DirectX. That said, when they do get a game working, it works great. I have it on my machine running Jedi Knight 2, Max Payne and a few others, and they actually run better in WineX than the do natively.
Is it possible to run both at the same time (wineX for my games, and wine for applications?)
Yes, you should be able to do this. Tough to play a game and draw something in Photoshop at the same time though. ;-)
What is an inexpensive way to do this if Wine or WineX is not the way to go? I looked at VMWare, but almost 300 dollars is a little much with its current limitations, and no upgrade insurance. Hardware requirements (i.e. extra ram, hdd space, cpu power, etc.) are not an issue.
You could also look at CodeWeavers Office. It is an inexpensive Wine adaptation that is targetted at running MS Office in Linux. Many people have reported good success with installing other applications. VMWare is really good for running a virtual PC. It's like having a second computer. It works very well for applications, and fails on gaming. You do not have 3D accelerated video, and sound stutters. The virtual video card in VMWare is not capable of doing the 3D stuff you need for games these days. I did install Civ2 in VMWare at one point just to see what would happen. It worked, but the sound stutters really badly... makes it almost unplayable. Windows in VMWare views your Linux machine as another computer on the local network. If you have Samba setup nicely, you can do peer2peer file sharing/transfers via Network Neighborhood. You also have access to hardware devices like NICs (for your cable modem if you have one) or modems for dialout. In my experience, the more memory you have the happier VMWare is. C.