Submitted by “Virtual Bridges, a provider of enterprise and SMB solutions using virtualization for business, announced today the release of Win4BSD Pro Desktop Win4BSD Pro Desktop runs as a FreeBSD/PC-BSD application and allows users to run Windows applications and desktops with seamless ease on the BSD platform. The company also announced that it will be releasing Win4BSD Virtual Desktop Server, a FreeBSD-based desktop consolidation server, during October.”
As the Windows Vista RC nuked my partition table before crashing yesterday, it’s a good time for me to give Win4BSD a try.
All my servers are FreeBSD, but I’m hesitating to use it at home. I try once every few years, but I always start missing my Windows applications after a week.
I hope the performance is good and stuff like shared files/clipboard works well.
I wonder what this means: “Ability to display either full desktop mode or “floating” application mode”. I’d love to see some kind of emulator which would display any Windows window as a native window on the desktop; I hate the experience of working in a little Windows screen and switching back and forth to the native OS. I can’t find any screenshots of Win4Lin doing this though, so maybe I’m hoping for too much.
If Win4BSD works, I wouldn’t mind paying for it. I can’t go without Windows, but I’ve been praying for FreeBSD on the desktop for years.
I really fail to understand why people need Windows at home. What do you need it for? I mean I run Debian and I have yet to find an application that – in my case – Linux does not in one way or the other supports.
Ok, I don’t play games – that’s about the only thing I can think of why people need Windows at home.
I had once used FreeBSD only as my desktop for about a year without much difficulty. I don’t play games either, but some popular sites use ActiveX and/or Java extensively, so without ActiveX and/or Java I couldn’t even navigate through those sites, and therefore I didn’t use those sites. Well that was fine until there was a need to use one of those sites daily heavily
I had difficuly running IE with Wine. I have Firefox but as I am currently a web developer, I need to see how the page is looked on IE occasionally.
I think at current stage, Wine could possibly be used to run many Windows applications on FreeBSD like IE, Office or Photoshop maybe easily with the help of IEs4Linux or similar. Once I’ve tried Photoshop with Wine on FreeBSD. It wasn’t perfect but was nearly there I rekon. It was approx. 2 years ago!
I wish Wine could be more refined quickly and become stable and usable even for people who want to switch but cannot due to they are dependent on some Windows applications.
BTW, Win4BSD is interesting too. We, BSD users now have more choices!! Xen with VT hardware(AFAIK it is still under development tho), Wine, VMWare(I know it’s not officially supported but It was quite usable in my experience), Qemu and now Win4BSD. I didn’t mention Bochs because I don’t think Bochs can compete in this area with others I’ve mentioned above. It has its own usage.
Edited 2006-10-01 01:46
I had difficuly running IE with Wine. I have Firefox but as I am currently a web developer, I need to see how the page is looked on IE occasionally.
I don’t know if IEs4Linux will work with FreeBSD or not, though I would guess it would.
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/
It is an excellent solution to this very problem. In fact, it is difficult to run more than one version of IE on Windows, but IEs4Linux easily lets you run IEv6, v5.5, and v5.0 simultaneously.
IEs4Linux doesn’t work on FreeBSD. You get lots of error messages.
I really fail to understand why people need Windows at home. What do you need it for?
I mainly run the BSDs and linux, but I also have to run windows, because some of my sofware only works in windows, like my mathematics software
Edited 2006-10-01 03:27
There’s no need to ask why, really. Many people need or want MS Windows at home, including you, as you say. It is as it is.
When I changed motherboards recently, PC-BSD crashes hard on KDE startup, but XP works fine. So for now I use XP.
Win4BSD seems very interesting.
@deb2006
I really fail to understand why people need Linux. What do you need it for? I mean I run Windows and I have yet to find a reason to run Linux? Why would I settle for an OS that might work with my peripherals and have to apply hacks to get games to run.
OK, I don’t find that RMS is important. That’s probably the only reason to install Linux period.
😛
OMG, ronaldst, I was going to post exactly what you just did:! LMAO!
So all I have to say is: DITTO!
I’ll just add this: I use *BSDs all the time. At work, and at home.
And I also *have* to use Windows, because of some applications I use, which are just not available for any UNIX OS. So, “Linux on the desktop”, for all that keep saying it, “Keep dreaming”
I’ve been hearing that for over 10 years now LOL. It just won’t happen, and specially now with the GPL3 disaster about to happen, Linux will have more lossed than gains. What a shame!
Edited 2006-10-01 08:35
That’s why I use windows at home. The last time I searched there was nothing in Linux that easily does what Dorgem can.
sounds like Wine (www.winehq.com) to me. Or am I wrong?
No, actually Win4BSD has a QEMU license (Fabrice Bellard), and it is based on KQEMU.
On the other hand, Crossover Office is based on WINE. WINE is used to run a Win32 application on Linux and *BSD. Win4BSD is like Win4Lin.
Win4BSD will let you run a full WinXP operating system inside FreeBSD/PC-BSD
Two different projects and goals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win4lin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WINE
Why not just try qemu (+kqemu accelerator for i386)? Since it’s based there anyway. Just 2 lines for you… “qemu-img create c.img 5G”, “qemu -hda c.img -cdrom <your win iso> -mem 512 -localtime -boot d”. Viola! win installation in progress…
Edited 2006-10-01 04:37
Win4BSD works much faster than Qemu+KQemu. They optimized their code heavily and added features that is not found on original development. All changes in Windows base system made automagically so after Windows install in Win4BSD you got fully configured shared folders with your FreeBSD system and optimized registry for virtual machine. And it really works like native application in window- no need to press some strange keyboard combination for leaving Windows environment- just move mouse outside and you are in FreeBSD again. Speed is impressive and multilanguage keybord support is here. One feature that I especially like is “snapshot” mode, which prevents changes to the guest session’s “C:” drive from being committed to the disk image file; this is useful to prevent unwanted changes to your Windows installation (i.e. viruses, “malware”, “spyware”, etc.) once you have configured your applications as desired- anything saved to the guest session’s “C:” drive will be lost once you exit the session.
Edited 2006-10-01 08:19
Do you happen to know what the system requirements are? I couldn’t find mention of that on the website.
Also, I see they have a money-back guarantee, which is nice, but I’d rather have an evaluation version to try out before I buy it.
Do you happen to know what the system requirements are? I couldn’t find mention of that on the website.
It may work with 256MB of ram, but it would be incredible slow (lot’s or swapping). My recommendation would be 512MB or ram and some descent cpu (1GHz of better).
Also, I see they have a money-back guarantee, which is nice, but I’d rather have an evaluation version to try out before I buy it.
They have 14days trial period.
Edited 2006-10-01 10:52
Thanks, antik. A 14 days trial sounds good, now I’ll just need to wait till I get my new notebook so I can try it out.
So, “Linux on the desktop”, for all that keep saying it, “Keep dreaming”
I’ve been hearing that for over 10 years now LOL.
Agreed, I don’t think I can count the Linux for Desktop stories I hav read & I just been using linux for 2 years. Anway glad to see something like this, I don’t yet have PC-BSD, but I may download it when I join the broadband age. I hope to this coming week one day.
| I really fail to understand why people need
| Windows at home. What do you need it for?
| I mean I run Debian and I have yet to find
| an application that – in my case – Linux
| does not in one way or the other supports.
| Ok, I don’t play games – that’s about the
| only thing I can think of why people need
| Windows at home.
If you’re talking about “home usage” in terms of email, web browsing and writing a letter I agree.
For me there are enough applications I need to use like Quark Express, Finale, InDesign, Powerpoint which are not available to linux or freebsd. Maybe there are other (free) software solutions to do the same thing (however I really doubt they’ll ever reach the quality level of the commercial ones) but if you work in a team you can’t just use another program and use different file formats.
Of course the final solution would be that the market is interresting enough to port these applications
to the “free” platforms but will it ever happen?
In the mean while a good VM/emulation environment is something I prefer. Solutions like dualboot or seperate computers I really dislike.
Edited 2006-10-01 22:39
How does this Win4BSD application differ from EMC’s VMware?
Is one clearly better than the other?
How does qemu compare with these?
I have read through these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU
Thank you for your help.
Since when newer versions of VMWare works on BSD?
Since when newer versions of VMWare works on BSD?
VMware does not run natively on BSD but I have understood that it runs quite well on the linux emulation layer.
I am happy to see a product developed directly on BSD but does Win4BSD carry any advantages over VMware?
From my understanding, Win4BSD carries two distinct advantages over VMware:
1) Win4BSD runs directly on FreeBSD without a linux emulation layer.
2) Is much cheaper than VMware.
I suppose I would be very interested in reading an article that compares the various VM applications with each other. Especially now that these applications are developing further and gaining in number.