FW: NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Open Source" from InfoWorld.com, Wednesday, November 22,

Wed Nov 22 14:07:44 EST 2000

Here is an alternative to VMWARE, if all you want to do is run MS Windows
under Linux...

PS.  All I know about this product, is what I have read in the following
note, so don't ask me any questions about win4lin.

Stephen Dawes B.A. B.Sc.
Web Business Office, The City of Calgary
PHONE:  (403) 268-5527. FAX: (403) 268-6423
E-MAIL ADDRESS:  sdawes at gov.calgary.ab.ca

-----Original Message-----
From: OpenSource at bdcimail.com [mailto:OpenSource at bdcimail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2000 10:49 AM
To: sdawes at gov.calgary.ab.ca
Subject: NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Open Source" from InfoWorld.com,
Wednesday, November 22,

========================================================
NICHOLAS PETRELEY:   "The Open Source"    InfoWorld.com
========================================================

Wednesday, November 22, 2000

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GET WIN4LIN AND WINDOWS USERS WON'T FEEL
DISENFRANCHISED UNDER LINUX

Posted at November 17, 2000 01:01 PM  Pacific

I'M REALLY ENJOYING the recent media madness over the
presidential election. It has been a real learning
experience. For example, I've learned that I should be
able to get just about anything I want by claiming to
be "disenfranchised."

So last night when my wife served meat loaf, I
complained that I would have requested something else
but her dinner choices were too confusing. If she
didn't want me to feel disenfranchised, she would have
to make a whole new dinner.

In the unlikely event that you're an all-Linux shop,
Windows fans in your organization may be feeling a
little disenfranchised. In the more likely event that
you are an all-Windows shop, the Linux users almost
certainly feel disenfranchised.

Here's one way you can enfranchise both groups: Obtain
a copy of NeTraverse Win4Lin 2.0 (currently in beta,
see http://www.netraverse.com). Win4Lin allows you to
install Windows 95 or Windows 98 as an application
that runs on Linux. When you start up Windows, it
appears in a window on your desktop, after which you
can install and run almost any Windows application
(you can't run most games because Win4Lin doesn't
support DirectX).

I installed the Win4Lin 2.0 beta and Windows 98SE under
Caldera eDesktop 2.4 and Debian 2.2. I used the
Windows display settings to resize the Windows desktop
to 1576x1087, which fits nicely inside my 1600x1200
KDE2 desktop. Then I installed Microsoft Office 2000
and Netscape Navigator 4.76. I tried all the
applications that would make a Windows user feel
disenfranchised under Linux: Outlook, Excel, Word,
PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, and Access. So far they
all work perfectly.

The performance is downright amazing. At first I had
some minor performance problems with XFree86 set to a
color depth of 24. Then I set the color depth of
XFree86 to 16 bits and allocated 48MB of RAM to
Win4Lin and Windows 98 (the default is 24MB of RAM).
With these settings, both KDE2 and Win4Lin really
scream on my 600MHz P3 system. I can use Word,
PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Internet Explorer, and
listen to a RealPlayer audio stream under Windows all
at once with no problems. In addition, even with this
entire suite running, Win4Lin has no perceptible
impact on the performance of any of my Linux
applications.

It can be a little tricky to install Win4Lin, depending
on the Linux distribution you're using and the
hardware you have. If you are using the default kernel
for most Linux distributions, the Win4Lin installation
program will patch the kernel binary. I customize
every kernel I use, so that wasn't going to work for
me. Fortunately, NeTraverse provides patches for
various kernel source-code trees. I patched my kernel
and had the Win4Lin-enabled kernel running in about
half an hour.

The rest of the installation was pretty
straightforward. Win4Lin copies your Windows CD to the
hard drive, and you install Windows 98 fresh from
there. The only thing that caught me by surprise was
the fact that I needed a Windows boot floppy as part
of the process.

Windows 98SE under Win4Lin has some limitations.
Although all your TCP/IP-based Internet applications
will work fine, you won't be able to do any Windows
networking. That means you can't use Windows printers,
use the network neighborhood, or map network drives.
You can, however, mount network resources using Linux
and then assign them to drives for use by Windows. So
you can usually duplicate whatever drive mapping you
normally do in Windows by playing some tricks with
Linux.

Win4Lin also has a tricky way of making just about any
Linux printer -- including remote printers -- appear
as a special hardware port to Windows. Unfortunately,
I'm experimenting with the new Common Unix Printing
System, so I wasn't able to fully test the capability
of printing to my network printer.

You can download the Win4Lin 2.0 beta and use it free
for 75 days. Win4Lin is reasonably priced at $59 for
the download, and $89 if you want the CD-ROM and a
manual. If you really want to migrate to Linux but
you'll feel disenfranchised without your Windows
productivity applications, Win4Lin is a must-have.

Nicholas Petreley is the founding editor of LinuxWorld
(http://www.linuxworld.com). Reach him at nicholas.petreley at linuxworld.com.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"If you asked people, 'Would you fly in a plane that was
running on Windows?' most would say, 'No'."

--Brian Livingston in his InfoWorld column "Window
Manager."

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/11/20/001120oplivingston.xml?112
2weli

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Discover JRun 3.0, the Java application server that
offers full J2EE capabilities! With its modular design,
JRun lets you choose the J2EE technologies you require
for rapid development and deployment of enterprise and
e-commerce Java applications. Attendees receive a copy
of  JRun Server Developer Edition and Allaire's
Developing Applications with JRun Manual. You could also
win a copy of JRun Server 3.0! Reserve online today at
http://www.allaire.com/jruncyber/OpenS1

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