March 19, 2001, 3:40 PM —
I have a confession to make. I run Windows on my laptop. That is, I run Linux, and then use Windows under VMware. This month I want to explore the various alternatives for running Windows applications under Linux. While I had long been aware of Wine and VMware, I had only recently heard about another approach: Win4Lin. With that in mind, I fired up Google (another Linux success story), ran a search on Windows emulators, and found one additional lead, Bochs. So this month, we will look at those four alternatives for running Windows applications under Linux.
I run Windows because many of my customers use it along with Linux, and I need to test the same Windows-based applications that they run. However, the main reason surfaced when I got my new laptop about a year ago. I felt adamantly that I would run Linux on it because I had lots of work to do on Ethereal and was writing a book on Samba (see Resources for a link). Unfortunately, I had several years of mail locked up in Eudora that I needed to access. I also needed to run Word, PowerPoint, and Excel on many occasions, and the dual-boot blues did not appeal to me any longer. So, I got VMware and loaded Windows under it, and I've been much more productive ever since.
While Linux makes great strides in the server space, many desktop applications still only run on Windows at the moment. Thus, many people out there can't run Linux exclusively but need a second system to provide access to the few Windows applications they use.
