Forum Moderators: bakedjake
For my xmas project I'll be wiping my entire system and re-installing.
At present I have RH8 and Win98 residing on seperate partitions but, I'm fed up having to reboot to check sites in IE
So, just how tough is it to run Win from inside Linux and can it be done without any special software?
Many thanks...
Nick
Never used it, though. You have to pay :(
René
I have been using win4lin for the last 6 months.
Its easy-ish to install and runs almost everything you throw at it.
Mostly I use it for Dreeamweaver, Photoimpact 7 (never got on with Gimp) and the odd MS Office job that OpenOffice can't do.
Downside: it is slower than native Win 98 - not a major issue for me, but you wouldn't want to play and modern games with it
Upside: When windows crashes it can be restarted in 8 seconds.
NB
You do need a licensed copy of Windows 98 during the install process.
With vmware you need to have samba or nfs running to share files with their virtual disks. I don't know how win4lin handles file sharing.
>> I'm fed up having to reboot to check sites in IE <<
It is very nice to be able to have IE open and test as you develop.
4eyes..
With win4lin is the file sharing done the same way you do with wine by just accesing a fake c_drive or do you need samba?
When you upgrade the kernel do you have to reconfigure win4lin?
I set my installation up this way - figured if VMWare bombed, I could always boot up the Win drive under the Windows OS. In theory it's realatively easy but in practice it's also easy to set it up wrong - which is what I did. I couldn't access the drive when I tried to boot it up alone. VMWare made some changes to the MBR which made it impossible to boot without VMWare.
Suffice it to say I was nonplussed and stopped using thier product a year ago.
I know other folks that have had good luck with their product but do yourself a favor and get someone familiar with the setup to help you if you go this route.
Yep I did the same thing when I first installed :) You have to be careful which partitions you give vmware write access to.
If you use the virtual disks it is very clean and easy. I use a 2 gig virtual disk for the OS and installed programs and then set up a user on linux with a samba share for printing and all the data files. You could set samba up to share your home directory but I felt more secure keeping my home seperate.
According to [appdp.winehq.org ] IE6 works under Wine if you also have Windows installed on your machine and the DLL load order set to "native, builtin". The comments are all several months old, so there's a decent chance that it will work. I may have to go home and fiddle with that myself. I have no desire to use IE, but testing my sites in it is an unfortunate necessity.
That said, I'm posting this from IE 5.5 under Wine. Excuse me while I go burn this disk image to CD before I screw it up.
-Andrew
Which was my downfall for sure! It felt sort of like the old low level format command for MFM drives. There weren't a lot of opportunities to get it right and you'd better know how many heads/sectors you needed or you were screwed. :)
Then again, bochs 2.0 was just released, it will be interesting to see how much things have improved.
Then again, bochs 2.0 was just released, it will be interesting to see how much things have improved.
Umm... I was using bochs 2.0pre3, and wine 20021125. The Windows 95 disk is an old OEM disk from 1997, version 4.00.950. That probably means that Bochs 2.0 won't be a huge improvement over my experience. On the other hand, if they fixed the network problem, or that was a stupid mistake I made, it might work to set everything up in Bochs and then run from Wine for everyday use. (Who wants to test their pages in IE when it's running dog-slow 16 colors in a 640x480 window?)
If Wine gets some of their cabextract functions implemented, one might be able to do the whole install from wine. That would make me happier, I think.
Some day when I'm feeling adventurous I might try upgrading to win98 and ie6, but that's not right now.
-Andrew
The config program allows you to easily set a Linux directory to read as if it was a windows disk.
Win4Lin is not without its problems, though - it is quite a bit slower than native but this is made up for by the ability to reboot after a crash in less than 10 seconds:)
Win98 installation in Bochs was slow, but relatively painless as long as you have something else to do while it's going on. Pop the CD in and go, basically. I still have the problem with Bochs networking not being reliable enough to do the download and the IE installer not working in Wine. However, there's a quick and easy way around this that I remembered from my days doing tech support at a law office.
1) go to a real machine with Windows and network access.
2) run the IE installer
3) choose a custom install
3) click on the "advanced"
4) check the "Download only" option.
5) choose a folder to put it in
6) copy that folder someplace you can get it from Linux, then from Linux copy it into the Bochs hard drive image. (mcopy works well for this)
7) Fire up Bochs and run the installer from the new folder you just coppied in.
The install will again be slow but relatively painless, and when it's over you can shut down Bochs, mount the bochs hard drive image, and use IE from Wine - at perfectly normal speeds.
