David, Take a look at Win4Lin Pro. Win4Lin recently released the Pro version which allows users to run XP and Win2k in a process under Linux. It uses QEMU, and while it doesn't get the 'better than native' OS operation speeds of the Home version (which only runs Win95/98/ME, not 2k or XP), it does get fairly decent speeds, I'm told. Plus, the OS doesn't know it's not native. It does one thing, I know, that WINE never will, and that is support customized toolbars, VB extensions, and macros in MS Office. There are, I'm sure, other things that you'll be able to do better as well. VMWare will give you similar benefits, in many respects, but it does require a natively installed version of each OS, while Win4Lin installs the OS in the user's homedir.
The biggest thing, though, is the price. Win4Lin Pro is $100, while VMWare is $300. VMWare is possibly better for the heavy duty power user, but for non-geeks, Win4Lin will probably do very well. Note that it probably won't do serious games or graphics intensive stuff, if that's what her kids want, but it'll be fine for Quickbooks. OOo will probably do the rest very well, but you'll be able to install Office on WinXP under Win4Lin, too, as well as most other Windows apps that she might need. With a free VM, you get what you pay for, in my opinion. While many folks have gotten things to work perfectly, would you rather take the chance that you'll have hours of tweaks to get it to that point, only to have hours of work fixing it if it breaks, or would having a support source to help you out work better? Plus, if this is her work laptop, it's a writeoff for the company. Your call, though. -Ben Pitzer On Apr 7, 2005 12:12 PM, David McDowell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > anyone have good success with WinXP Home/Pro in QEMU?? (I'll be trying > QEMU on CentOS 3.4 or 4.0 possibly). CEO keeps having terrible > problems with her kids and her XP installation constantly crashing... > I've almost convinced her to try linux, but need to give her a way to > get to Microsoft Office and Quickbooks, figured a free VM is better > than paying for crossover or something. > > How'd the networking and how's QEMU on allowing the VM to access the > local /home of the host OS? > > Thanks, > David McD > -- > TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug > TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ > TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ > TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc > -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
