Wine and Virtual Machines are a bit different, although there is some overlap.
Wine emulates a PC and allows you to run a single application by fooling the application into thinking that Windows is there. As far as I know Windows is not actually involved and no Windows license is needed. Instead it emulates only the low level API that applications use to do things. Virtual Machines are like having a complete PC inside Linux. They create an environment in which you can install Windows (or any other OS). Windows thinks the PC is real, but the "hard drive" is actually just a file in Linux. In order to run applications you need to install Windows (or another OS) first, then the applications run inside this "guest" OS. WINE is windows only. Virtual Machines can be used to run Windows or other Linux distros. If you are finished with the virtual machine you can simply delete the files and it's gone. If you have enough RAM you can run multiple virtual machines at once (think running Ubuntu on your PC with a Windows XP virtual machine and a Fedora 8 virtual machine at the same time). Virtual Machines share the RAM so you need at least 512MB of RAM for a single virtual machine to run smoothly. More RAM for more virtual machines. I'm not sure what the RAM requirement for WINE is, but it's probably a lot less. Andy Ian Wright wrote: > Hi, > > I was trying to get my head round the concept of 'virtual machines' the > other day and failed to understand just how they work - do you have to > install the other operating system on the machine you are using the > virtual software on - ie. if you want to run a windoze program on a > linux machine using Wine - do you have to load a version of windoze also > or does the Wine prog do some magic? Please explain to yet another > senior citizen.......! > -- Andy PGP Key ID: 0x67090A54 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
