Submitted by “For several years, Win4Lin has offered a virtual operating environment whereby you can run Microsoft Windows inside of GNU/Linux. The first several generations of Win4Lin were limited to Windows 98, difficult to install, and had requirements that were difficult to satisfy, such as a proprietary kernel module and various acts of command line kung fu. Version 3.5 still has some of these problems, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be.”
Don’t see a need for this. For *BSD there is qemu, for Linux there are some different applications like Vmware, Virtualbox and so on. Why should anyone buy such an application?
Commercial support and it’s associated cost. If they had NO competitive advantage whatsoever compared to existing solutions, they’d already have gone the way of the dodo.
Wait and see, most of the competitors aren’t superior only but new too. You can’t compare qemu with it’s lack of performance in graphics to some of the other competitors – it’s just nonsense. I don’t need support for an inferior application.
There is also Win4BSD.
and if one really insists on having some closed system, one may aswell use vmware server or vmware player.
Why should anyone buy such an application?
A.) They aren’t you and neither know (nor need) what you do. They see it, they like it, they buy it, they use it. No problem.
B.) It’s what the boss wants. Operations authorizes it for use, IT buys it, designated users use it, the boss is happy.
C.) Dan is running Solaris on x86 hardware:
WINE for Solaris isn’t up to ver. 1.0 yet and hasn’t been modified since April of 2005. Not an instant knockout, maybe if nothing else works he’ll come back to it.
He isn’t interested in using WABI. He doesn’t realize that WABI won’t work for him ; he has rejected it based on the $1000 fee for a Wabi server license (as if he could actually still get one).
He sees an ad for Win4Lin, notices it’s cheap, bets he can get it to run under Solaris because it has pretty good support for running Linux binaries. It’s at version 3.5.
D.) Users won’t bring in their own disks and run cloaked VMware appliances on their workstations.
E.) A vendor recommends it as a supported method of or workaround for running a ‘Doze program that you want to use. You tried forcing the vendor to support qemm, VMware, Virtualbox, etc., but they declined listen further after the first 15 minutes of telling them how much better your idea was.
F.) It was on the shelf at Fry’s and I still had money left on my card!
Edited 2007-02-07 21:30
“not nearly as bad as it used to be” I better buy that right away.