The first thing that surprised my after launching Windows 98 under Linux was the amazingly short boot time. On my Athlon XP1800+ Windows 98 boots in about 5 seconds. It is worth noting that there are two ways to start Windows/Win4Lin. The "win" command launches Windows in a X window, the "fwin" command starts an X server and runs Windows full screen, which gives the illusion that you are really running plain Windows, with fast boot up times. The good performance is not limited to the boot sequence, applications launch very fast, most of them at comparable speeds as on native Windows.
The largest limitation of Win4Lin is the lack of DirectX support. Even old DirectDraw programs do not work very well. For example, I tried to run some old games like Civilization: Call to power, with no success.
A nice feature, which is hidden somewhere on the Netraverse site, is the Appwrapper program (this can be found under "Miscellaneous Files" in the member account screen). By replacing the default "explorer.exe" with appwrapper in system.ini, with an application as a parameter the specified application will run in a Window on the desktop, as if it were a stand-alone Linux application. This feature is particularly useful in environments where one Windows program is used.
Enough talk! Let's look at some action ;). I cannot test every single program, so here are just two examples I use in my daily life. The first program you will see in action is Tarski's World. I am a philosophy student, and logics is an important philosophy subject. So, I need my logic programs. Tarski is a program which gives students an introduction to first-order logic by using visual representations. As you can see, it just works.
Another suite of applications I sometimes need is Microsoft Office. I try to do my work with LaTeX or TextMaker as much as I can, but some documents are just a pain to convert decently. And sometimes I am flooded with so much work that I don't want to care about conversion, and checking that others can correctly read the file without disruptions, etc. I know I get flamed for this, but in a world where most people are using Microsoft Office and where the time pressure high it is often more pragmatic to use Microsoft Office to do the job quickly (price is not really an issue, because universities have large software contracts over here in the Netherlands, which allow students to use commercial software quite cheaply). So, here is Microsoft Office on Win4Lin.
Configuration and tuning
Win4Lin provides the "winsetup" tool, which can be used to tune some aspects of the Windows environment. For example, normally 20 MB RAM is reserved for Windows, this can be raised if you run applications that are memory intensive (20 MB should be sufficient for day to day work).
Another interesting feature is the "Drives & Filesystem" configuration, this allow the user to configure arbitrary Windows drives, and map parts of the Linux filesystem to the drive. For example, in the default configuration the "D:" drive is mapped to $HOME/mydata/. Unlike VMWare Win4Lin does not need Samba to make the local filesystem accessible from Windows.
Netraverse provides an extensive guide with a detailed explanation ofconfiguration options: here
PrintingThe most recent versions of Win4Lin install a default printer named "Default (local) Printer", which is configured as an Apple LaserWriter printer. This is a PostScript printer, and Win4Lin forwards printing jobs to this default printer to the default Linux printer. Thanks to ghostscript one can send PostScript to a properly configured printer, without caring about the underlying printer language.
ConclusionWin4Lin is a gem as it stands today. It is fast, configurable and a good solution in many situations. Compared to similar offerings it is also very affordable, even for home users. In my opinion there are only two gaps that have to be closed. First of all Windows 2000 and XP support, Windows 2000 is widely deployed in business environments and the TCO rises when Windows 9x/ME licenses have to be bought besides the Windows 2000 licenses. Windows XP is the de-facto operating system for modern home computers, and many home users have a Windows XP license. The second gap is smaller, and largely applies to home users, namely the lack of DirectX support. Running games on Win4Lin might be out of reach in the short term, but DirectX support is badly needed for some multimedia applications. As it stands today I rate Win4Lin 8/10, if they manage to support Windows 2000 for the next version, I can't wait to review it ;).
Rating: 8/10
- "Win4Lin review, Page 1/2"
- "Win4Lin review, Page 2/2"
