In message <3B1B87EE.CAA6A041@acm.org>, Paul Abrahams
Clayton Cornell wrote:
On Monday 04 June 2001 12:18, Geoff Bagley wrote:
I have two machines, both Pentiums.
One runs dual boot SuSE 7.1 and Win98. The other just Win98.
I have to keep at least one machine working with W98 because I have three Windows and two DOS applications I wish to keep.
If I had Bochs, would this enable me to run windows and DOS progs on the LINUX box ?
I have never tried emulators before. Any other LINUX newbies running Bochs yet ? Does Bochs compete with vmware etc. ?
Regards
Another Windows/MSDOS emulator you could take a look at is Wine. It works for most of your basic MS based applications. It is quite easy to setup - has a handy graphical interface for configuring - and works quite well most of the time. It tends to fail on high end stuff like games and some custom (non-standard) applications. It's a good idea to download and install the latest version of Wine... I found that the version shipped with SuSE7.1 would crash a lot. the new version available at http://www.winehq.com/ is much more stable.
I'd advise anyone who is concerned about stability to avoid Wine for now. Last time I looked, the website was full of warnings about Wine's experimental nature. I would take those warnings very seriously. There are also performance issues. If you're looking for something to play around with, Wine's fine. If you're looking for something to get real work done with, I'd avoid it. (Unless you're entered in a high-stakes Minesweeper tournament -- but then again, KDE has a fine version of Minesweeper.)
Honestly I like Wine (haven't tried Bochs yet, but I do plan on trying it out soon) much better than VMWare. VMWare starts a virtual machine in a window. This has it's advantages such as in a commercial environment where a robust emulator is critical. In Wine, each application runs like/similar to an X app. Also.... Wine is free for distribution under the terms of it's license... VMWare is quite expensive to purchase.
A cheaper and better alternative is Win4Lin (www.netraverse.com). Be sure to get Version 3.0, which came out very recently. I think it costs about $70, maybe much cheaper from places like Linux Mall (I haven't checked). I've used Win4Lin for about nine months, with very good if not totally perfect results. In particular, I've not had problems running Quicken, TurboTax, or Word 2000, and the performance on my machine is probably 80% of native Windows. (With a faster startup time.) But it won't run some games that depend on DirectX.
Paul
I made the original enquiry. Thanks for the replies. The DOS applications I want to run (under LINUX) are Wordperfect 5.1, and Turbo Pascal 7.0. The Windows 9x applications are TURNPIKE (for the time being), the front panel to an ICOM IC-PCR1000 radio, the support software for a Motorola DSP EVM, and a QUATRO spreadsheet. Quite a mixture ! I guess I'll get suitable LINUX substitutes or emulators one day and become a M$ free zone. Regards -- Geoff Bagley