OT: Fwd: New Product: Win4Lin Home, and Special Offer

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2005, Michael Hipp wrote:
>Matthew Carpenter wrote:
>
>>Although given what little I know about Win4lin, this seems a little
>>much, though.  Does Win4lin run windows apps like in a VM like VMWare or
>>along side Linux apps like Wine?
>
>It's comparable to VMware. It runs a copy of Windows installed inside an 
>emulator and then you run apps in that copy of Windows.
>
>Unlike VMware, it only runs Windows versions up to Win98. Which is 
>probably fine as Win98 will run essentially any Win32 app.
>
>The big disadvantage of Win4Lin is that it requires a specially patched 
>kernel to run on essentially all the major distros. Which means once 
>installed, no more kernel updates from your distro provider. I find this 
>unacceptable.

At one time the win4lin folks provided patched kernels for SuSE and some
other distributions, but apparently decided this was too much work for
them.  I personally think this was a major mistake as it limits their sales
to people who are cabable and willing to patch their own kernels.  I'm not
sure that most people able to do this, are peoplw who would be wanting to
run things on the Microsoft virus, Windows.

FWIW, some of the win4lin developers go 'way back in the Microsoft on *nix
platforms.  At one time they were Locus Computing, authors of PC-Interface
and Merge which allowed people to run Windows on X11 as far back SCO
OpenDesktop 2.0.  They probably know more about the internals of Windows
than most of the so-called developers in Redmond.

Bill
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