Re: How stable is WINE?
Ethan Pierce wrote:
>In my opinion WINE isnt all its cracked up to be, but better than it has
>been in the past.
I don't know that wine has ever been cracked up to be more than it is, at
least not by the developers. It is certainly getting better.
>If you want to run windows apps in linux, install vmware
>(www.vmware.com). It runs VERY fast depending on how much virtual ram you
>can afford to allocate. I use 128mb for my virtual machines. Ive even had
>execellent results with fullscreen windows media player under vmware.
If what you really need is to be able to run windows and linux at the same
time then vmware is certainly cheaper than the other obvious solution, which
is to buy another box. However, the hardware and software required is still
a few hundred bucks beyond my reach. For my purposes it would also be gross
overkill.
wine has a long way to go before it provides a general replacement for
windows, but frankly that doesn't bother me one bit since I won't be using
it for that. Even so wine does two things that make it extremely useful
right now. One is that it allows people like Corel to port their
applications written for the windows API to linux without too much pain. In
fact much of the recent improvement in wine can be attributed to Corel. The
other is that it allows people to run (some) niche applications for which
there is currently no native linux alternative, which is what I use it for.
So depending on what the original poster actually wants to do, wine may well
be good enough. If it works for him at all, it will certainly be less
expensive and resource hungry than the alternatives.
Frank
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