What's the current state of WINE and similar projects?

[Kevin Buettner]

On Aug 23, 10:34am, Mark Berkwitt wrote:

> Were those programs you tried of a particular type?  IOW were they games or
> office programs? Do certain types of programs have problems with WINE?
> Are there any other software initiatives attempting winXX to linux ports?

The programs that I've tried are MapSource from Garmin and Topo! from
National Geographic.  As I recall, MapSource had problems which made it
unusable.  Topo! works reasonably well, but it's usefulness was limited
by the fact that Wine lacked the necessary functionality for dealing
with serial ports.  (That may have been MapSource's problem too; it's
been a while since I've tried it though.)

The other programs that are useful for running Windows programs under
Linux (in some form) are Win4Lin (see http://www.trelos.com/) and
VMware (see http://www.vmware.com/).

I have not used Win4Lin, so I cannot report on how well it works. 
Win4Lin requires that you have either Windows 95 or 98 (and I don't
have either of these.)  Others on this list have reported that Win4Lin
works quite well and is faster than VMware for some things.

I do use VMware though and can report that it works very well.

Kevin