Hari Krishna Dara wrote:
[...]
VMWare is like Wine, but my understanding is that it runs at a lower
level than Wine. Also Wine is an emulator of Windows, where as VMWare is
a virtualizer for OSes. It exposes the host hardware as virtual devices,
and allows multiples OSes to boot and coexist at the same time. You can
find this information at vmware.com. If you heard about MS virtual PC or
MS Virtual Server, VMWare is not much different. When you use VMWare for
booting Windows, you would need a valid license. If you only have a OEM
license, I don't know if you can install it on a different machine, but
if you can reinstall that OS on a new PC, it means you can install on a
VM as well.
Isn't there a cross-compiler for producing cygwin executables from
Linux?
I see. My Windows XP was installed on my laptop, not from a CD but from
a "hidden partition" on that laptop's hard disk; that is of course
inaccessible now that the laptop is down, and I suspect that XP version
to be an OEM version keyed to the laptop's hardware. (It can not even be
reinstalled a second time on the same machine: select French or Dutch at
first boot, and you're stuck forever with whatever you chose.) As I said
in my previous post, I haven't found any separately-available Windows
distribution recently. Also running Linux and Windosw in parallel in
"time-sharing" mode makes me uneasy. The farthest I'm ready to go is a
dual-boot machine: both OSes installed on the same machine, but use only
one of them at a time, and switch by means of LILO, Grub, or by changing
the "active" partition. However even for that I need an installable
Windows, and I guess I won't get it.
About the cross-compiler, I don't know; but I don't think I have it on
my SuSE system, which AFAIK isn't meant to produce software running only
on Windows. I'd rather let Steve Hall do the job of publishing patched
Vim distributions for Windows, at least for the time being. (His Vim
site http://cream.sourceforge.net/vim.html currently offers a Windows
self-installer for version 7.0.017, with both vim.exe and gvim.exe, all
interpreted languages except MzScheme, all runtime files as of 25 May
2006, etc.)
Best regards,
Tony.
