win4lin

[Kurt Granroth]

Josh Coffman wrote:
>    I'm going to have a lot more need for using windows
> at home, and I'd like to run it virtually so I can
> still boot on my beloved Fedora. Anyone able to get
> WinXP running virtually on linux? Ugin win4lin?
> vmware? xen?
> 
> Please help me avoid booting windows.

Well, you will be booting Windows in any of those solutions... it'll
just be inside of a virtual environment instead of having to reboot.
The only way you can run Windows apps without running Windows itself is
via Wine (or Crossover).  That's highly dependent on what app you want
to run, however,

You basically have two or three choices.  Xen is *not* a choice yet
since Windows will not run in it without code changes.  That will change
in the near future with virtualization support in the CPU... but that's
not yet.

Win4Lin is $80 or so.  I haven't used it, personally.  It is reportedly
quite a bit slower than VMWare for Windows XP.  It also has mediocre
networking support, doesn't support USB devices other than keyboard and
mouse, and no sound or advanced graphic support.  On the other hand, it
is far less resource intensive than VMWare so if system memory and the
like is a premium, then it's a definite candidate.  And if you're
running Windows98 or earlier, than the Win4Lin 9x series is quite fast.

VMWare is likely your best bet.  I run it quite a bit.  It used to be
that you had to pay massive amounts of money to run it, but no longer.
Now you can download the VMWare Server or VMWare Player for free.  They
both work great.  Both will run Windows XP flawlessly.  VMWare is a
resource pig, though, so I would be hesitant to run it in anything less
than 1G of RAM.  You *can* run it in less, but again, I don't recommend it.

Kurt