On Mon, 05 Jul 1999, Yants wrote:
> Great! I've got my Mandrake running pretty smoothly. However, there some
> apps which aren't readily available to Linux, like MS-Office, Photoshop,
> Diablo,etc. Is there a way to load Windows/Dos applications on linux. I've
> heard people talk about Dosemu, WINE, VMWare, but these sound like more
> cryptic linux jargon. Please advise.
>
> Yants
For a replacement for MS Office, you might want to try Star Office which you
can download for free. (I don't feel like hunting down URL's to copy/paste, you
should be able to find this stuff easily enough with searches or Linux
download sites). There is also a commercial office suite called Applixware if
you don't mind spending some money, and a free suite being developed for KDE
called KOffice if you don't mind either trying to get the development version
to work or waiting for a mostly functional version to be released.
For a replacement for Photoshop, there is a program called Gimp that comes with
Mandrake, you might want to try playing around with that.
As for Diablo, well, I guess you'll have to boot to Windows whenever you want
to play, and back to Linux when you're done.
As for the programs you mentioned... Dosemu is a DOS emulator, and Wine is a
Windows emulator. You'll probably need to read plenty of documentation to get
either of them set up. Generally, the older and simpler the DOS/Windows
program, and more likely it'll work okay in Dosemu/Wine. I wouldn't expect
newer games and larger Win95 programs to work reliably. And vmware is a
commercial program (Dosemu and Wine are free and open source) which is supposed
to allow you to actually run two operating systems at the same time. I don't
know how stable and fast that would be on a typical computer though.
-Tom
