About a month ago, NeTraverse contacted OfB Labs with an early release copy of Win4Lin 5.0, the follow-up to the already impressive Win4Lin 4.0 released in May 2002. Win4Lin, for those not familiar with it, offers near-native (or better) speed “virtualization” of a Windows box so that one can run Windows 9x (95/98/Me) inside GNU/Linux. Read the review at OfB.
Win4Lin 5: A Real Win for Linux Users
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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What versions of Linux does it support?
There is a kernel patch for the ones that it doesn’t. You patch your kernel, you recompile and then you should be up and go. (just make sure you enable the backing store on your XF86Config too)
Sorry Netraverse; I purchased a copy of Win4Lin 4.0 but I won’t be upgrading.
The product is based on technologies of SCO Merge – which I assume means that they get paid royalties.
’nuff said.
(Well, honestly, the SCO merge bit is only part of the reason. The lack of a promised response email from 5 months ago drove me to VMWare with my rusty (not a mispelling) copy of Windows 2000 Server for Terminal Services of Windows apps. Looks like another potential Win4Lin Server Edition down the tubes.)
Can someone explain how this is technicaly differnt then Wine? I am a bit confused..
Wine is a re-write of the Win32 APIs plus a PE loader, this seams to be more akin to VMWare, but Windows centric.
Anyone remeber the Win3.11 thing like this for solaris?
Do games/DX run OK under this?
The main reason I wanted to try this was so that I could run some sound applications but apparently thats win4lin’s weak spot
oh well, btw i’m too slow to use vmware on my hardware but win4lin does a great job for people on slow machines. It just doesn’t work for the only reason i need it. figures..
>Do games/DX run OK under this?
The answer to this is in the discussion here:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=3509
So no, ahh well.
..but surely the whole point of having Windows 98 available on a Linux system is that Windows is easier to use for some tasks
I suspect that if you tell joe user that they have to patch and recompile a linux kernel before they can run Windows, you’ll find 99% of them doing what I recently did and reaching for a Windows bootdisk.
Format c:
Y
CD D:
CD Setup
setup.exe
Is Netraverse own by SCO ?
..but surely the whole point of having Windows 98 available on a Linux system is that Windows is easier to use for some tasks
No, it is so you can use IE, MS Word and photoshop, instead of Moz/Konq., OOo and GIMP, plus most users could not install Word, so it would be installed by the companys IT guy.
my pentium 133 laptop with 48 MB ram can load word 2002 in less than 5 seconds with win98se as native OS.
what a waste of technologies !!!
That 12 seconds was to boot up windows in Win4Lin *And* start up word. How long does it take for your computer to boot up from a power off and start word?
Its takes my Powerbook about 12 seconds if I put Office as a login item
Well, Word starts at native speeds in Wine, just like a normal app.
Of course the advantage of Win4Lin is that assuming you have Win98 and don’t mind a desktop in a window, stuff is far more likely to work. But…. surely actually needing a copy of Windows defeats the point?
“That 12 seconds was to boot up windows in Win4Lin *And* start up word. How long does it take for your computer to boot up from a power off and start word?”
I guess there is not an option to not “boot windows” here.
Anyway, 12 seconds on a P4 2.53G to compete with an P133’s 5 seconds in itself is a shame. the cpu is almost 20 times faster, and the hard drive will most likely a 7200 rpm one compared with a 3600 rpm 2GB notebook hdd of 97 era.
And OOo took 16 seconds to open on the same speedy 2.53G…
My hat off 😎
I don’t think needing a copy of Windows defeats the point. We all already own Windows 95, 98, 98SE and/or Me disks that we can legally continue to use for the rest of our lives, might as well not waste them in the closet. I’ve been using Win4Lin 4 (and now 5) for about six months now and I’m very impressed. If you want to run *complete* Office 2000/XP on linux this is the only way to go. Even MS Access works, and it’s dang fast. Trillian, WinMX, Kazaa, Winamp, RealOne, Windows Media Player, etc. all work flawlessly as well in 5.0. I admit I pirated 4.0 but I actually bought my copy of 5, it was just that impressive.
>>Trillian, WinMX, Kazaa, Winamp, RealOne, Windows Media >>Player
And who need all this shit on Linux ??
We don’t need WinMX or Kazaa – we have Freshmeat and SourceForge!
We don’t need Winamp we’ve got Xmms or FreeAMP/GNUamp/SNW (StallAMP’s Not WinAMP) or whatever you call it.
RealOne? Ha. We’ve got Real Player for Linux.
Windows Media… nope if its got Windows in it, we don’t touch it – we just throw FUD at it or say our stuffs better. Ala Ogg.
For non-techie people, Microsoft has its own area for dll library. So, they can easily “help” their application.
I would not be surprised that this area is put on hard disk swap after other non-MS applications.
MS products will always be faster on loading and swapping than non-MS products.
wow! you run so manny windows applications on your linux box? what is then the point for you to use linux and not windows?
PC Anywhere, Avocent’s DSVIEW and DSADMIN, SameTime, and several other programs that I just can’t live without.
When you need a Windows app on the Linux platform you just can’t beat Win4Lin. 🙂
Mike Hearn:
Of course the advantage of Win4Lin is that assuming you have Win98 and don’t mind a desktop in a window, stuff is far more likely to work.
Actually, that’s not necessarily so.
If you dig around in the “misc files” part of Netraverse’ site, you’ll find a programme called “appwrapper.exe”
You can use this handy little app to launch a specific application – you edit the win.ini file in your Windows installation to replace the shell with appwrapper. The application that you wish to run is then called as a paramater of appwrapper.
Using this technique, you can have a desktop-less window with just the application in question running on it.
The big problem is that Win4Lin Desktop does not even remotely support multi-user (which version 2 did, IIRC). By that, I mean that you cannot even buy multiple licenses to legally run it for more than one instance. If you want to do that, you need “Win4Lin Server Edition,” which is priced at a similar point to Windows 2000 Server less the terminal licenses.
This bites because you have to have a minimum of 5 licenses – if you only want 2 or 3 users, you still have to fork out the necessary $1500.
And finally, changing Windows settings (eg, adding a printer) is like pushing sh*t uphill with a pointy stick. You have to re-edit the win.ini to have explorer.exe as the shell, “boot” Windows, make your changes, shutdown, re-edit the win.ini, take a swig of coffee and “re-boot” Windows before you are in business.
Some days I just feel like slapping some of the Windows-only companies around the face with a copy of winelib. Or a trout.
With the new CrossoverOffice you can run photoshop, word and a ton of other apps on Linux without needing VMWare or Win4Lin
>>>>Trillian, WinMX, Kazaa, Winamp, RealOne, Windows Media >>>>Player
>> And who need all this shit on Linux ??
people who know that the linux apps are a pain in the ass to use and require more configuration than they want to perform, but still need a *nix environment for development and what not.
why do people always assume the one is always better for everything in every case?
Quote:
“..but surely the whole point of having Windows 98 available on a Linux system is that Windows is easier to use for some tasks
No, it is so you can use IE, MS Word and photoshop, instead of Moz/Konq., OOo and GIMP, plus most users could not install Word, so it would be installed by the companys IT guy.”
I just use Crossover Office for that stuff.
Actually, you can view most Windows Media file with the newest versions of Mplayer and Xine (as well as QT/Sorenson files).
>> And who need all this shit on Linux ??
people who know that the linux apps are a pain in the ass to use and require more configuration than they want to perform
Actually, the Linux equivalent to the apps mentioned don’t really require any more configuration than their Windows counterpart.
You people need to chill. I was just giving examples of its impressive range of support for Windows apps. I use Win4Lin mainly for MS Office and IE6 when a site absolutely requires it, as well as WinMX when I can’t find what I’m looking for with LimeWire. Trillian once in awhile when I want to use the secure-IM encryption (can’t be too paranoid these days), otherwise I stick to Gaim and Kopete. I’ve used Kazaa once in awhile too. Oh and the Quicktime player has come in handy. Basically the draw of it for me is that it’s like running two computers at the same time with no loss in speed. I love linux and linux apps, but if I can have even more variety and flexibility thanks to Win4Lin, I’m going to use it. It’s sweet to be able to not have a windows partition or windows box in the house but still have access to ALL windows software when I need it. For people that just want to do the same repetitive functions with the same five or six programs over and over again I can see that it wouldn’t be that useful…but for me I get bored easily and need to keep switching things around.
P.S. Windows 98 is actually a really good OS when it’s just being used as a shelf for launching windows applications and isn’t controlling any of your hardware. It never crashes on me, but I’m sure it would if I were running it natively on its own partition.
Win4Lin is based on WABI, which was an old Caldera product which allowed you to run Windows 3.11 on Linux and (possibly) Solaris, IIRC.
In other words, Win4Lin is a bunch of old code from the mid-90s (I think the last version of WABI was released in 1997) that allowed you to run 16-bit Windows 3.1 in a insecure VM.. then was modified to run 32-bit Windows 9x/Me in a insecure VM..
I recommend running VMware Workstation 4. It runs STABLE operating systems. Version 4 is supposed to be a more full-featured virtual machine.. which means it can run debuggers such as SoftICE with no problems (IIRC).
>>>that allowed you to run 16-bit Windows 3.1 in a insecure VM.. then was modified to run 32-bit Windows 9x/Me in a insecure VM
Wrong. Win4Lin is does not run Windows in any kind of VM. All it does is trick Windows into thinking Linux is DOS. Windows 98 running in Linux via Win4Lin is just running as an application (explorer.exe to be exact) nothing more. There is no emulated environment, no virtualization at all, so it is not a VM…and that’s why it’s so dang fast. You can download their 80-page PDF manual if you want to learn more about it. They are very clear and specific on this point.
> I just use Crossover Office for that stuff.
Crossover Office comes with a IT guy included, cool 🙂
I’m not saying you can’t use something else (Wine, Crossover, VMWare, Windows Terminal Service & a Win2K box…), just this is an extra option.
>Win4Lin is based on WABI
Thats the app, yes, it runs on Solaris (Sparc) is its the same product? Cool.
Actually, as I said in comment #3 “Sorry Netraverse,” Win4Lin is based on SCO Merge.
Sorry for the obscene words (SCO), but I’ve used it in context! 😉
NOT TRUE (Score:5, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19, @12:21PM (#6243914)
Folks,
Win4Lin is not built on technology licensed from SCO. SCO licenses technology from NeTraverse as an OEM and packages the technology on their UNIX platforms under our name “Merge”. We do not license anything from SCO (nor do we need to). From time to time we have used wording on our web site and in our literature that is accurate but perhaps on a quick read might be misconstrued. The comment “Win4Lin Terminal Server 2.0 is derived from proven technologies developed for Unix® based operating systems over the last 15 years, most notably those of SCO® (Caldera®), under the product name of Merge(tm)” is meant to convey that our technology has been in use on SCO variants of UNIX for some time – not that it is based on SCO technology. SCO Merge (or Sun Merge, or whatever Merge) is our product.
Rather than try and clarify the language on our web site, we will be taking it off 😉
I hope this clears up the misinformation.
Jim Curtin
CEO NeTraverse
—
Umm.. the company can’t be very big if the CEO has time to reply to slashdot comments (that are pretty far towards the bottom of the page too..)
Woohoo! So it’s not an SCO product. Well, I’ll put v4 back on my box then!
I think that Netraverse is a pretty big company – which is why their customer service has been failing. (Not that big companies don’t necessarily have good customer service, just that companies that have gotten too big, too quickly seem to lack it!)
I’d suspect that somebody forwarded the post to Jim, or perhaps that they read any feedback from reviews sites. (Good, common sense!)
I’d agree to the fact that the wording on the site sucks!