Win4Lin

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for Heterogenous Office Environments
Review: As someone who must cope with colleagues who insist on sending Office documents as attachments, expecting me to do something with them, this tool is a painless way to make use of all my Win9n "drink coasters" - yes, it may not run the latest games, but for serious office application work, this is a God-send - everthing that it needs to do it does well - Office and Smartsuite applications, with networking, Palm synching - a fabulous product that does NOT have the VMWare limitations of requiring a pre-defined (unsharable) virtual disk or setting up SMB/Windows networking to get to the rest of your machine. VMWare has its place, but this is a great tool for those of us who just need one or two Windoze apps to get Linux onto our office machines.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for Heterogenous Office Environments
Review: As someone who must cope with colleagues who insist on sending Office documents as attachments, expecting me to do something with them, this tool is a painless way to make use of all my Win9n "drink coasters" - yes, it may not run the latest games, but for serious office application work, this is a God-send - everthing that it needs to do it does well - Office and Smartsuite applications, with networking, Palm synching - a fabulous product that does NOT have the VMWare limitations of requiring a pre-defined (unsharable) virtual disk or setting up SMB/Windows networking to get to the rest of your machine. VMWare has its place, but this is a great tool for those of us who just need one or two Windoze apps to get Linux onto our office machines.

Rating:
Summary: Take control of Windoze
Review: I downloaded their demo version because I wanted to make sure my programs would work on it. After installing it which went very easy, I installed my Visual Studio C++ 6.0 and compiled an MFC app and a COM module which worked just fine. I have also tested Autocad 14 with it and it worked just fine and so does AOL 5.0 so I bought the program after only a few hours after trying the demo. Works very well and allows me to compile programs within my Linux environment.

Rating:
Summary: Very easy to use and works great
Review: I downloaded their demo version because I wanted to make sure my programs would work on it. After installing it which went very easy, I installed my Visual Studio C++ 6.0 and compiled an MFC app and a COM module which worked just fine. I have also tested Autocad 14 with it and it worked just fine and so does AOL 5.0 so I bought the program after only a few hours after trying the demo. Works very well and allows me to compile programs within my Linux environment.

Rating:
Summary: Limitations
Review: The top requested features not yet available are:

* Direct Device Access: Currently limited to serial and parallel port.

* Direct X (as used by most games): Not supported

* DirectDraw (as used by RealPlayer): Not supported

* Cut and Paste between Windows and Linux: Not supported.

* CD-ROM Recording: Writing to CD-R and CD-RW devices is not supported

* ActiveSync does not correctly sync with WindowsCE-based hand-held devices

By my humble opition, such features have to be outline in SCREAMING big letters on the box and in the editorial review.

Rating:
Summary: Take control of Windoze
Review: Win4Lin allows me to run as many copies of Win98 as I can put in my Linux /home partition. Currently now I have 15 or so at average 100mb each. What this lets me do is install/uninstall software without the risk of destroying my Win98 installation - and without having to backup a disk, just a directory. Win4Lin installs in the user's home directory in a directory named Win. By selectively copying and renaming directories, I can keep seperate developement environments going for each of my clients, or try an installation and do a uninstall. I have a Personal Web Server and MSSql server copy using Visual Interdev, that allows me to test under Linux without re-booting - just change desktops.

While the limitations for games are well documented by reviewers, Win4Lin is outstanding for business apps - they will actually run faster and safer than on Win98 natively, when no MS file systems are used, under Linux file systems.