Randall R Schulz wrote:
Steve,
On Tuesday 31 August 2004 07:50, Steve Kratz wrote:
Only Wine is free
Crossover Office is an excellent product, and CodeWeavers does support WINE and host WINE on their server.
Another possibility is to use Win4Lin (http://www.netraverse.com/products/win4lin50/) This runs as a process under Linux and supports Windows 9x (eg. 98, 98SE, ME). It is cheaper than VMWARE, and uses the Linux file system.
Another thing to contemplate as far as VMWare goes, is you need a pretty robust machine (plenty of processor, memory, and HD space). Since it emulates an entire computer running Windows, it's a bit of a resource hog. (My laptop, a Celeron 366, runs SuSE 9.1 fine, with Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver running under Crossover Office 3. The same machine chokes to a halt trying to run VMWare.
I have to concur with this. The overhead for the virtual machine is not negligible and the fact that two competing OS vye for resources in a way they were never designed to do (i.e., cooperatively) mean neither OS will perform as well as you're accustomed to.
Another thing to keep in mind is that in the so-called "guest" operating system (the one running within the virtualized environment), the hardware complement is partially virtualized (in the sense that they're a complete fiction of the VM). Specifically, the VM creates the video and network devices, and they're pretty vanilla ones. For the network interface, that's not much of a problem, but some people might find that an S1 video adaptor is a little meager for their needs.
I wonder how the AMD 64 bit chip would be at running Windows as a Linux app? An example of something similar, was the way OS/2 could run Windows 3.1 in a DOS session. On some versions of OS/2, instead of running the included Windows, you could actually install Windows from the floppies. If the same could be done with Linux, with the same level of integration i.e. cut n' paste between the guest and host OS, it would make things a lot easier.