Re: [SLUG] Win4Lin and M$Office: followup rant

From: Ed Centanni (ecentan1@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Sat Jun 16 2001 - 11:20:28 EDT


I've used VMWare to run Win98 on a very healthy (1.2 Ghz) machine and
it's still a pig compared to running the foreign OS natively. Yes,
Windows is more stable under VMWare. It takes a 600+Mhz machine to get
adequate performance. VMWare will catch some hardware exceptions that
Windows misses or handles improperly. You can "freeze" the windows OS
state, save it to disk and restart the windows OS very rapidly (compared
to rebooting) to exact the point you left it -- running applications and
all. Gives you a sort of instant on/off capability. No more long boots
or shutdowns or application starts since you can leave your Linux
machine on 24/7 and just suspend and restore the windows OS. You'll
probably still need to reboot it occasionally to allow windows to return
to a stable internal state. (What a piece of garbage!)

I haven't used Win4Lin yet but it is reported much faster than VMWare at
the expense of some hardware and network support. Both of these are
commercial product$.

Searching in my vast underground caverns of links, I found an an open
source project that performs the same functionality named Plex86
http://www.plex86.org/ Reported, it can boot/run MSDOS, FreeDOS, Linux
(under Linux) Win95, NT 4.0, QNX demo v4, and NetBSD( as guest and host
OS). It's under heavy development and I don't know if it's far enough
along to be usable.

Personally, I think anyone is better off avoiding microsoft products
whenever possible and minimizing their use if they can't be avoided.

Ed.

Paul M Foster wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 03:26:09PM -0400, Robert Haeckl wrote:
>
> > Legacy M$ apps (meaning Office95/Office97) work well in Win4Lin.
>
> Question: supposedly under VMWare, Windows apps run more stably (fewer
> crashes). Would you say the same is true for Windows apps running
> Win4Lin? I'm thinking of replacing my wife's Windows with a SuSE system
> running Win4Lin, and she's a power user. She _kills_ her system
> routinely. It would help if I could say that her Windows apps wouldn't
> crash as much (or Windows itself, for that matter).
>
> Paul



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