windows xp and Mandrake 10

[c2120]

I decided to try out linux. all over the board i read about wine and vmware, i know that wine is running appilcations and vmware is running two os simultaneously.
my questions is can i access my win applications that is installed on my win xp?
how do i use vmware from the list on mandrake's website it looks like vmware is included??? (not really sure) i would like to run win xp inside linux.

i currently have win xp and already partitioned a drive for linux.


thank you

[techieMoe]

Okay. Let's start with what VMWare is and isn't. VMWare is an emulator, which means it is software that creates a fake computer (virtual machine) in your system memory that acts the way MS Windows expects a computer to act, and allows you to run Windows applications within the program.

Since VMWare does not access your hardware directly, as far as I know it would be impossible for you to run the programs that you installed on your XP harddrive from within the VMWare virtual machine. I am not a VMWare guru, so I welcome corrections on that.

VMWare is also a commercial product that is *very* expensive. If you saw a version of VMWare bundled with Mandrake it's a demo. The demo of VMWare usually only lasts 30 days. After that you must buy it ($199USD).

There are other ways to run some MS Windows applications in Linux, such as WINE (free but hard to get working), Crossover Office ($40USD), or Cedega ($15USD) which is just designed for running games.

The bottom line I'm trying to stress here is that unless you have some mission-critical application that you must be able to run in Linux or you'll lose your job, VMWare is not worth your money. It's just as easy to dual-boot your machine and have one harddrive running MS Windows and another running Linux.

[kkubasik]

o really, get something like wine or cedega working, they will run 65% or so of windows apps out of the box, and will allow most to work if you copy over the needed .dll's

[Giro]

o really, get something like wine or cedega working, they will run 65% or so of windows apps out of the box, and will allow most to work if you copy over the needed .dll's

I really dought this comment.

most to work if you copy over the needed .dll's

Thats not out of the box.

[techieMoe]

o really, get something like wine or cedega working, they will run 65% or so of windows apps out of the box, and will allow most to work if you copy over the needed .dll's

Well, I think the operative phrase is "get something like wine or cedega WORKING", since in my experience doing so is far from easy. In fact, I've had several systems in the past and have yet to get Cedega to run on any of them. WINE runs Trillian, StarCraft and Solitaire, but that's about it. Also, I agree that if you have to copy DLL files over, that's not out of the box support.

[c2120]

Thanx everyone for your comment.

what i mainly want to run is MS Office, Macromedia Studio, and Visual Studio.NET.
Which program should i use and should i reinstall these programs in linux or just extract them form windows?

thanks

[techieMoe]

Thanx everyone for your comment.

what i mainly want to run is MS Office, Macromedia Studio, and Visual Studio.NET.
Which program should i use and should i reinstall these programs in linux or just extract them form windows?

thanks

When working with MS Windows, I've learned *never* to try and transplant a program from one install to another. There are all sorts of registry keys and hidden files that get installed when you install something. My advice is to install fresh inside VMWare, and just copy any project files personal data into it if possible.

On a side note: I've run MS Office and Macromedia in Linux with Crossover Office and had great success. Your mileage may vary, just FYI.

[andrewdodd13]

im not sure, but i doubt that visual studio .net will run under linux except VMWare, but then you need to install windows on to that anyway.
the reason for this is AFAIK .NET isn't integrated into WINE so whenever you tried to run VS or compile an application it would quit with errors.

[techieMoe]

the reason for this is AFAIK .NET isn't integrated into WINE so whenever you tried to run VS or compile an application it would quit with errors.

I'm not completely sure about that either, so I they're going to have to load one program in a VM, they might as well load all of them in the VM.