“Win4Lin announced the immediate availability of their new Enterprise and SMB product, Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server. The product provides the ability to consolidate and serve multiple Windows Desktops from Linux server infrastructure. Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server allows organizations to standardize the application environment to users regardless of desktop hardware and operating system – Windows, UNIX, or Linux can be used on the client, but a common application profile can be created and served from Linux server configurations such as blade servers, rack arrays or large multi-way machines.”
I think this kind of technology, including here FreeNX, VNC, etc, can really help streamline the disribution of client applications that avoid the use of the browser.
I don’t know; I haven’t been as impressed by recent Win4Lin products – the Windows 98 era was really interesting (and usable) due to the way it worked – I owned a copy and it stayed installed until last year.
The recent versions, however, are more like the virtual machines available from other sources, and I just don’t really see much to differentiate them from their competition.
I would tend to agree. I also owned a copy of Win4Lin and I used it until Netraverse stopped providing kernel patches in a timely manner.
Compiling the kernel might have put some people off the product, but it was precisely that lower level integration that appealed to me. I would run Win98 via Win4Lin on a virtual desktop and it ran so smoothly that you could easily forget that you weren’t actualy booted into a full Win98 system.
I tried an evaluation copy of Win4Lin Pro with Win2K and it doesn’t seem nearly as smooth to me.
Fortunatley it’s not much of a loss to me. I used Win4Lin because I *could*, not because I actually needed it. I haven’t really missed it at all.
The 98 era was fast but that architecture was impossible to use in the Windows 2000/XP world. And, there was a LOT of resistance in the corporate world (and the distros) to the low-level kernel patches – not to mention that it with the rapid (wanton?) pace of sweeping changes to stable areas of the Linux kernel in 2.6.13 and beyond, it has become difficult and expensive to keep up.
That being said, with the 3.0 release of Win4Lin Pro, and the Virutal Desktop Server, the performance is, apples to apples, very comparable (XP, natively, will never be as light and snappy as 98). Win4Lin continues to make improvements in performance but with the latest releases (in the last month or so) there has been a big improvement.
The architecture is closer to VMware but it still focuses on user integration and specializes in running Windows on Linux, whereas VMware is still designed for the technical professional who needs to run more than one operating system at a time. Win4Lin’s ease-of-install, it’s file system integration and the lightness of the processing model make it ideal for users who really only need to run Windows, as opposed to multiple OSs. Plus, the new feature for allowing users to display only the application, as opposed to the whole desktop, is really nice.
IBM’s Workplace is a good solution for companies committed to IBM and IBM’s application set but it requires too much of a commitment to the IBM way, as opposed to the Win4Lin approach which is more agnostic and accomodating to a users own direction.
The main point of this release is that it represents the intersection of VMware trying to host desktops on ESX and Citrix/Microsoft trying to server desktops from Windows servers. This is a real solution for Linux vendors and Linux users as Linux remains the operating system on the metal.
Yes, I have been a big fan of Win4Lin for some time, but bias aside, I thought this information might be useful.
IBM Workspace on Demand for Windows did exactly what they are producing. It did not take off well. I hope Win4Lin does better.
Jim
It will only encourage windows programmers to ignore linux.
The new WinXP/2k/NT compatable products are useing the popular free open source program qemu for emulation/virtualization.
I expect that newer products would benefith from the upgraded kernel kqemu module that allows virtualiazation of both ring0 and user-mode code. At least the original qemu is lighthing fast with it.
Unfortunately qemu virtualiaztion of ring0 code is not compatible with win98…