Four routes to Lin-Win desktops

Todd Volz ZDNet US

Published: 19 Apr 2002 09:57 BST

But the flexibility VMware offers comes at a price. VMare is powerful but it's also relatively expensive -- not just in terms of price ($299 per system) but also hardware requirements. VMware's documentation says a 266MHz CPU is the minimum requirement, but in our tests using a 500MHz PIII, the Windows virtual machine was noticeably sluggish. To get the most out of VMware you really need powerful hardware; but since most companies are already running Windows-which requires much more horsepower to run than Linux -- migrating to Linux to run Windows on top of it seems moot.

NeTraverse Win4Lin 3.0 takes an approach similar to that of VMware. But rather than using a real (or virtual) FAT file system for Windows -- as VMware does -- Win4Lin uses the Linux file system, which improves emulation performance considerably compared to VMware, especially on modest hardware. And although Win4Lin ($79) is considerably less expensive than VMware, its limited OS support and ability to run only one virtual session at a time pale in comparison to VMware's ability to run multiple sessions and OSes.

The alternative to emulation is to run Office applications "natively" on Linux using a utility that can translate Windows API calls to the Linux OS. But this method can be complex to use, as exemplified by Wine, an open source project branded as a Windows "compatibility layer." Wine is less than user-friendly and typically requires much tweaking to get Windows apps to run properly.

However, Codeweavers has deftly modified the Wine technology to create CrossOver Office. Using Wine's compatibility layer, CrossOver Office lets you run MS Office apps -- as well as Lotus Notes -- under Linux. We found CrossOver Office surprisingly easy to install and configure, and the performance of MS Office apps was comparable to performance under Windows. While there are still nits to pick with the product (font rendering, for example), CrossOver Office is easy to use, fast, and cheap ($59), and thus more likely than other Windows-on-Linux solutions to make corporate migration to Linux on the desktop a practical alternative.

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