On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 00:27 +1300, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: > > Win4Lin have a similar offer > > > > http://www.netraverse.com/LUG/ > > I'd be interested here too, the price is certainly much more reasonable. > In the past however win4lin had a number of drawbacks affecting its > usefulness:
I purchased a copy of win4lin myself about a year ago and have been using it on my main desktop occasionally to run the odd little windows application that wont run under wine. I don't use it that often, but have been pretty impressed with it generally speaking. Win4lin, as far as I can figure out seems to be an implementation of DosBox [dosbox.sourceforge.net] combined with a kernel patch that lets it basically share the cpu with the kernel (and hence run DOS applications, such as windows 9x at native speed). There are also a set of windows 9x drivers which can talk to their Linux equivalents, ie, a sound driver which talks to ALSA. While they don't specifically advertise it, the ability to run DOS apps properly was a major selling point for me since I maintain a old DOS application I wrote some time ago which is still in use. The reviews I read when I was deciding between either Win4Lin or VM ware indicated that win4lin was much faster. In some cases, linux is much faster at talking to various things things like the hard disk, which explains why some windows applications actually run faster under Win4lin than native windows. > Kernel patch required. Effect on stability? It's not likely to be > uptodate with all distros + versions either. I'm distinctly unkeen on > things mucking with my kernel. I have not noticed any stability problems with my system either before or after installing win4lin. They do provide binary kernel packages for most of the common distros (not debian though). I prefer to compile my own kernel and patching it is no big deal. I found they always have patches available for the most recent stable linux kernels. Might be a problem if you use development kernels. > Guest OS only 96/98 and now ME. That's enough for the billy-side, but > installing other Linux versions as guest could have its uses. Yes. It's a completely different design from VM ware, and note that it will never (at least in its current form) be able to run windows NT/2000/XP. I don't know of many windows apps that don't have windows 9x versions but this might be a problem in the future. > Limited support for applications - not everything runs. I have found one or two things (like old windows 3.1 apps) that didn't work, but thats probably because they are trying to talk to hardware in some non-standard way, I didn't really investigate much. Windows games, and anything that uses directX will not run at all. Not really a big deal for me, their is always wineX for that. > Limited features - I tried to find details, but it seems that e.g. audio > input is not supported. This rules out the use of speech recognition > software. Vmware needed some time before audio input was supported. > Support for various hardware gadgets which don't have Linux support > could be handy, however win4lin doesn't do USB at all and can't even > read a file off a data DVD. That's bad. Not sure about the audio in (seems it should be possible to support). It is possible to use things like windows printer drivers under win4lin to write raw linux printer port devices for peripherals that don't have linux drivers, I have not tried it though. You can also of course print from windows through the linux driver. No problem that windows itself cant read from your peripherals properly, just use that app which comes with it to set up one of your windows 'drives' to point to /mnt/dvd or whatever. Mount the DVD under linux and you can use it with windows no problem. No direct cd-writing though, you would have to use the windows app to make an ISO image then burn it from linux. > It still looks like a good product though. Another disadvantage you didn't mention is that you need to reserve some ram for exclusive access for windows which is then no longer available for linux. In practise I found that 16mb or 32mb is plenty though since the 'drivers' are only very small bridges to linux drivers already running. The only major bug I have found with it is with the NIC driver - there are 2 ways you can set up networking. You can have it access the network through linux (and thus use the linux tcp/ip stack) or you can let it share the NIC with linux, and thus have essentially another machine on your network. This is what I did, and found it very useful when samba was playing up. In this mode though it seems to stop about 500mb of the way through a file transfer for no apparent reason. > Volker > -- Richard Graham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
