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. VMware is quality, powerful software, there's no doubt. It's also complex and expensive. Unless you really need a lot of ongoing concurrent access to two operating systems on a single computer, I don't think it's particularly advisable. If you can get buy with dual boot, then you're better of working in that mode. On the other hand, there are a lot of rough edges using CrossOver office. I deem it quality software, too, but it's no where near as robust, comprehensive or mature as VMware. And, of course, it costs only a tenth of what VMware does! Randall Schulz