On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 05:19:48PM +1000, Simon Wong wrote: > > heard of Win4Lin. It runs Windows 9x (95/98/ME) very well, and > > there are extremely few hiccups with it. Compatibility is > > extremely high since you're running Windows inside a virtual > > machine -- but the VM is _much_ faster than VMware. > > What apps are you running?
I mostly run Word, Excel and Paint Shop Pro 7 under it. Hardly demanding applications, but they work well. Don't expect it to be a full-blown Windows replacement though; one major limitation of Win4Lin is that it doesn't emulate a whole lot of memory for Windows. By default, it ships with 32MB -- which seems pitiful if you know anything about Windows, but I'm guessing that they somehow have a different way of managing memory, because almost all programs I've thrown at it seem to be very happy with that. Truly memory-intensive beasts (e.g. Photoshop) will have no fun under Win4Lin, though. Version 4 may change that, if you're really lucky. > Have you/anyone tried running something similar that needs to talk to > com/Ir ports? I think that many people on the win4lin-users mailing list have got Palm desktop etc to work properly, although a few of them have problems with it. However, it's always quite hard to diagnose whether those users are having problems with Win4Lin itself, or whether it's a non-Win4Lin related problem. (e.g. perhaps their kernel isn't configured properly.) > > I bought a copy, I'm going to buy another one soon, and I have no > > idea how I'd live without it. www.win4lin.com for details. > > They've mentioned that version 4 is going to be released quite > > soon, too (within the next few weeks). > > Is there any way to get an evaluation version? It seems you have top > patch your kernel as well which seems extreme. Was it easy? They used to offer evaluation versions, but not any more. Oh well. The kernel patch isn't too bad, but hey, I regularly patch my kernels, so I don't find it to be a big deal. They do keep up with the latest kernel versions quite well, typically releasing patches a day or two after the kernel comes out. (No dice if you're running 2.5, though.) One thing to note is that their kernel patches are not compatible with a lot of the more intrusive kernel patches, like rmap and preempt. It does co-exist nicely with the low-latency patches though, which works very well for a desktop system. Even with all these problems, I still recommend it fanatically. I've managed to convert over a few people from Windows to Linux, and they now use Linux exclusively, which would not be possible without Win4Lin. (Yeah, I know that sounds contradictory, but you know what I mean :). Being able to run Windows apps reliably and quickly from Linux when you need to is a godsend. -- #ozone/algorithm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - trust.in.love.to.save -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
