?? What is that? How does that work ??
I’m getting suddenly a virus a day, man, I never had that problem before! 
Of course I’m trying to ween myself from Windowz, but hubby and I play EQ and AO, LOL.
Thanks, Ingie
VMWARE is a commercial PC emulator for Linux. You get multiple virtual PC machines inside Gnome or KDE windows. Free alternatives to run Windows software would be Plex86 and Wine but they are not reliable.
Have a look at WorldForge for open source alternatives to EverQuest
http://www.worldforge.org/
As to the size of Europe, Finland, Sweden and Norway are much larger than they look on the map because of the projection system.
Unfortunately our transportation systems are not excelent, in many places they’re quite bad. Poor people are stuck in their neighborhoods everywhere. Many Portuguese people living less than 100 miles from the coastline never saw the ocean :-?
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VMWare is not only commercial, but also proprietary. Many people treat this as the same, and I won’t go into explaining the differences here. I’m not against commerce, but against treating software as a property and selling people only licenses to use it, rather than the actual software itself.
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You forgot Bochs. http://bochs.sourceforge.net/ . It reliably ran all my assembler tries ;). It is also more actively developed than Plex86. If you ever wanted to run Windows inside anything (including Windows and Macintosh), you might want to have a look at Bochs first.
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Wine is very different from both VMWare and Bochs, in that it actually fools programs into thinking that the Unix system is Windows. You can use an already installed Windows, which (as of now) tends to make things run more reliably, but you don’t have to (as with Bochs and VMWare). It is also as fast as a native Windows installation, since it does not have to emulate a whole PC. For people playing games, WineX (which is both half-proprietary and half-commercial) from TransGaming might be an option, since these guys work hard to ensure that games are available outside the Windows world. (E.g., they have DirectX emulation.)
cu,
Felix
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OK, VMWARE is commercial and proprietary and costs around 400USD but it is the current only viable way of running all (or close to all) Windows 2000 software at native speed.
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Bochs emulates 386 processor itself, it’s speed is not even close to a native system. VMWARE uses the real 386 processor, only the protected instructions and hardware are emulated
If the Plex86 project had not failed it would have been the opensource VMWARE alternative -
WINE is not ready for widespread use. Most of the programs fail. Let’s hope it improves.
I feel I should take a moment here to endorse VMWare. It is absolutely fantastic. You can run Windows from inside your linux box (already a good thing!) so you don’t have to reboot if you want to access something from Windows. The slowdown is negligible - it’s as though Linux isn’t even there. You can run more than one OS at the same time - I’ve had Linux, Win 98, Win2K and XP all running at once (granted, there was a slowdown then, duh, but it was still usable!).
If Windows crashes, it doesn’t take Linux with it. No reboot, obviously a good thing. You can even put it as a Window, and quite literally move betwen OSs with the move of a mouse.
Best piece of cash I ever spent on software (excluding Linux, and of course my Blender membership).
Get it. And those of you who don’t want to use Linux, just give it a taste. No one says you have to be exclusively Windows or Linux. I use both quite freely - they’re good for different things. But if you don’t know what Linux is like, then how can you trash it here on the forums 
?
Ciao for now.
LethalSideParting (from whatever OS he’s on at the mo…he forgets 
)
I have a license at work and it allows my to run linux as
my desktop yet still have access to Windows once or
twice a week. It is an extremely nice product! Who
would have thought you could run Windows and
still maintain a healthy uptime?
Chris
Wow, cool. Thanks for all the info, I’m looking into that EQ thing too.
Thanks again, I love learning about new stuff like this, even if I don’t get to use it right away (money too tight to mention, LOL)
Love Ingie
Don’t forget that they offer free (and yes, I do mean “free as in beer”
for those who like to nitpick) demo licenses that have an expiry date.
This way you can “try before you buy”.
Chris
I must also put in my support for VMware. I have nothing against non-free or closed source software, as long as it’s not abused. If somone offers their products, at a ‘resonable’ rate, then great for them. What I do not agree with is people who use their market stance (ie: Microsoft) to charge unreasonable rates and force people to use unreasonable products with little or no choice. I just seen where Dell is not allowed to sell a user system unless it has a MS OS installed on it.
That aside, most of the world does run in a MS environment, so the ability to run Win apps on linux is a very big plus to us linux users. Even if it isn’t free, if keeps someone from ‘having’ to use Windows completely, then it helps us, not hurt us. For now, I use win4lin from http://www.netraverse.com , it seems to be very stable and reliable when I need to use a win program for a moment. It isn’t open source, but the price is reasonable.
But in the end, VMware probably has the best solution. The price is quite resonable also for a regular user. They offer guest OS kits that have the VMware and a licensed copy of windows already installed. Here are the guest OS kit prices from vmware.com:
$149 with Windows XP Home Edition
$249 with Windows XP Professional
$199 with Windows 2000 Professional
This is about the cost or cheaper if you bought windows by itself. But here you get the whole deal to satisfy your windows needs while using linux.
Unfortunately those are the prices of the Windows licenses only. You have to pay for the VMWARE license which is a lot more. I bought VMWARE at work because I had no alternative, WIN4LIN does not run Windows 2000 and WIN98 is pure crap, it crashes all the time.
Dangint… never mind my previous post. I should’ve figured a “resonable deal” couldn’t be real in todays world.
Well, I’ll stick to win4lin…
Of course I’m trying to ween myself from Windowz, but hubby and I play EQ and AO, LOL.
A fellow EQ player? What server are you and your husband on, and what are your names? I’m a “server drifter”, and right now I’m messing around on Tallon Zek, but if I can find any comrades I might change servers to be with them.
I use VMware express(win 98) on my linux box and VirtualPC 5 (win2k pro) on my PowerBook, they both work great and are worth the money. Wine is getting better all of the time, if you don’t mind or have the skill to tweak it, it works ok, better and better all of the time.
wine rocks!!!
I got my trillian, word and excel, and MatSpiderLF (w/ many crashes) working.