Help need with emulation

[sniper_wolf]

Im fairly new to linux. I have played on and off with it for some time and have use many distro's trying to find the right one.

I have read the sticky and tried the quiz on distro's but I am in need of a little help in the field of emulating windows based programs in linux.


I was wandering if there are any disto's with emulation software for this built in?

It would be nice if it emulated Direct-x but not a must.

Thank you!

[Trio3b]

I've thankfully not found anything I needed that couldn't be done with open source so I have limited experiencewith emulation but from reading over the past several years this is what I've gathered: ( in order of relative ease to implement)

1. Try to use native Linux apps
2. Dual boot with Windows
3. Virtualization with VMware, VirtualBox, etc.
4. With all due respect to the WINE project, they have had good success, but with limited software and poor success with the rest

Hope this helps

[kai12]

hi sniper_wolf,

maybe you could run windows in a virtual machine instead of emulating?
of course, this would require you to own a copy of windows.
then there is innotek's VirtualBox, and the opensource version of this
software is available e.g. in Debian (lenny).

the full version is available for free for private use, and a bunch of debian-based
distros are supported using repositories on VirtualBox:

deb http://www.virtualbox.org/debian gutsy non-free
deb http://www.virtualbox.org/debian feisty non-free
deb http://www.virtualbox.org/debian edgy non-free
deb http://www.virtualbox.org/debian dapper non-free
deb http://www.virtualbox.org/debian etch non-free
deb http://www.virtualbox.org/debian sarge non-free
deb http://www.virtualbox.org/debian xandros4.0-xn non-free

gutsy, feisty, edgy and drapper are ubuntus, etch and sarge debians.

afaik, many distros will include wine (i know
Debian does) but that doesn't mean it will work out-of-the-box for your
purposes. i've only tried to get the free viewers for MS Word + Powerpoint
to run using wine and abandoned the experiment when i couldn't get it running
within an hour. but that's very limited experience.

good luck! kai

[sniper_wolf]

Thanks! I will have to try that. I have a question about virtual machines then. How much strain does that put on your machine? I am wanting to emulate my Adobe software in a linux distro. I know there is gimp and so on but I love my adobe and spent way to much money on it not to use it.

Just wandering if it would cause system lag issues.


Im running an older laptop well its a p4 3.2 with HT and 1 gig of ram.

[kai12]

I'm running VirtualBox on an Intel Pentium 4 CPU at 3.00GHz with just 512MB RAM.
This is enough for me to use MS Word and Powerpoint and Internet Explorer
in a Windows 2000 guest system.

I only do checks for compatibility etc., the real work is done using openoffice
etc. natively. For me, performance is OK, but RAM is definately the bottleneck
in my case: always some swapping going on when I launch the virtual machine.

So I'm guessing with 1GB RAM in your system it's worth a try. Wouldn't
surprise me if your Adobe software was more resource hungry than the office
application that I'm using though. Haven't done any serious number crunching
in a virtual machine. You can probably find some benchmark numbers that
compare virtual machines and native systems if you look around.

kai

[sniper_wolf]

Yah they are. I am thinking a dual boot might be the way to go I wanted to go linux only but it might not work out that way till I get use to the open versions of video and audio production software.

[kai12]

hi again.

i got curious myself, searched, and came up with these numbers (from liquidat who's quoting heise.de (german):

        native     VirtualBox   Vmware
make    64:03 min  107:29 min   101:40 min
grep    6,7 s      20,2 s       18,1 s

so, apparently virtualbox and vmware are comparable, and compared to your native machine it'll more of less cut performance in half depending on the task ("make" refers to compiling a linux kernel, "grep" is searching a large file).

if you do give virtualbox a try, i'd be interested to learn how the performance turned out for you.

cheers, kai