Win Emulation

[Kevin Buettner]

On Oct 21,  9:27am, Mitchell LaKind wrote:

> Does anyone have any suggestions for a windows emulator.  RNi will slowly be
> moving the desktop pc's to Linux.  However some of the apps are required to
> be windows based.  Any help is appreciated.

These are the choices that I know of:

    vmware:  http://www.vmware.com/ 
    win4lin: http://win4lin.com/
    wine:    http://www.winehq.com/

The only one of these that I have recent experience with is vmware.

My recommendation is to try Wine first.  It is inexpensive (free!) and
will likely provide better performance if it works for your
applications.  Wine provides an implementation of the Windows API on
Unix.  This implementation is incomplete, so not all apps will run. 
AFAICT, the only way to know if it's going to work or not is to try
out the app in question.  There is also a database of Windows
applications that different folks have tried out, but this database is
also far from complete.

If Wine doesn't work for you, try either win4lin or vmware.  I think
win4lin is less expensive than vmware, though I have no direct
experience with it.  I have heard that it compares favorably with
VMware though.

VMware is really good.  It's not really a windows emulator though;
rather, it is a virtual machine that you'd run with Linux as its host
OS.  You'd still need to install some version of Windows in the
virtual machine.  The good news is that if you already have Windows
installed somewhere on your disk, you can make VMware use this Windows
install.

Kevin