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Which is best - Wine/Crossover/WIn4lin/Vmware?


Guest dysxhi
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During last month I tried out four main emulators (Wine/Crossover/WIn4lin/Vmware) on my Home PC having Mandriva Linux. The aim to run Window-XP and Window Utilities with in the Mandriva Linux.

 

My experience is as follows:

 

[1] Wine: Needs too much setting and always gives too much noise for want of DLLs. Only Window application can be run. Price: Free

 

[2] Croseover: Too much dependent on Window versions. Installations are not all the time successful. Only Window application can be run. Price: Indian Rupees 5000/- approx.

 

[3] Win4lin Pro (Trial version): Installed O.K. only with some little problem of changing the user rights in some files. Window XP, Office, etc. installed with-out any proble. The only problem is the speed, which needs support from qemu and/or kqemu. This is the most troublesome part. As Setting up the qemu and kqemu itself is not clear. In some cases, the gcc version is not matching with the version required. In others, the lower version of kqemu is required. In another, the rebuild kernel is needed with kqemu built-in. This rebuild kernel is overwriting the existing nvidia-kernel which means the lossing one function to gain other. Although, I have read from the Win4lin web-site that the next Win4lin Pro beta includes the required kqemu version within the rpm itself. This I could not test as the file was not available at the download location given. Price: Indian Rupees 5000/- approx. Only One instance of Window OS can be installed.

 

[4] Vmware (trial): Installed O.K. Does not depend on present OS. Not only window but multiple OS (window,linux, unix etc. can be installed) Only limitation is Main memory and hard-disk space. Any O.S. can be tested before installing in to the main area. Different distribution and versions of Linux also can be installed to have a feel. For any legacy application, old window versions can also be installed. Only problem, I have read somewhere that with the change of O.S., it is sometimes giving trouble. Price: Indian Rupees 10,000/- for CD Version. Rs.7,200/- for ESD

version.

 

All emulators: Please also note that none of these emulators are capable of sensing the actual hardware of the PC. These are making clone of devices of their own choice. Many of the PCI devices are also not detected.

 

One thing, I have to still try-out. That is, infecting the Virtual OS with the virues/worms and to assess whether it is getting affected at all or only the virtual image file get affected or the infection is also affecting the host files.

 

Regards

 

Dhananjaya Sharma

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I've experience with Qemu and with Wine.

 

My problem with wine is that it doesn't work with the programs I need (not that this happens very often). I can get most prgrams that are supported by Wine (and are listed on frankscorner) to work. But it's a hassle.

 

I started using Qemu a few days ago and I must say it's working perfectly. I read your comments about installing Qemu and my advize to you is: read the faqs for urpmi :). Qemu is in main if I remember correctle and Kqemu in PLF. I've written a HOWTO: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=27932 and installing is just following these steps.

 

As for speed: Yes it's slow. Qemu default RAM is only 128 MB. It's not fast. Starting a program takes a long time (what you can expect on an 'old' computer) but once it's running it feels quite snappy. I can get video on msn.com in windows mediaplayer 10 at full screen that doesn't look that bad.

 

The price for Qemu: E 0,- (thats RP 0,- :D )

 

Good luck.

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I tried Crossover (twice) and Wine on Mandrake, and Crossover v3 had a perfect install of all my Macromedia MX apps that I needed. v4 botched the install of IE6 though, which had problems for installing other stuff. Wine didn't work for me at all when I installed it on Mandrake (config hell) but I later got it setup perfectly on Gentoo using the wine-config-sidenet script (and a few added components such as Windows Installer and some DLLs).

 

If you want to try emulating something other than Windows, you could take a look at pearpc, a PowerPC emulator. Get a copy of Mac OS X (or a PowerPC *nix) and you can install it on this. Speed is quite painful on the current stable release, but build from CVS and you'll see a big improvement. They are currently working on hardware-accelerated graphics support for it, which will make a big improvement to speed.

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Security: as far as I know there is no crossover danger between Linux and Qemu (and Wine). However on the Qemu website there is a warning that tthe code hasn't been reviewed for security issues. I would guess that means that for normal every day viruses there is no problem. (I'm running a virusscanner). If it get's to bad just throw away the imgage file and start again. For Wine much the same goes. If you get a virus throw away the fake_windows folder and that should be it. :)

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Security: as far as I know there is no crossover danger between Linux and Qemu (and Wine). However on the Qemu website there is a warning that tthe code hasn't been reviewed for security issues. I would guess that means that for normal every day viruses there is no problem. (I'm running a virusscanner). If it get's to bad just throw away the imgage file and start again. For Wine much the same goes. If you get a virus throw away the fake_windows folder and that should be it. :)

 

A Wine-borne Win virus is not necessarily restricted to the .wine/fake_windows folder: it depends how many DOS devices you have in your setup. For example I have other drives mapped to / and ~, so stuff could get written to any areas that my user can.

 

Then again, it's a Win virus, so it will only work its badness under Wine (if at all, as running a Wine application is not equivalent to running a whole instance of Windows).

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