Wine troubles

[Dougal]

I have been wanting to use Wine lately to try to overcome some issues with Windows programs I have to use at work.
I am using Jaunty 9.04 which runs well till I run Wine then everything slows. I went to WineHQ and followed the instructions for installing the latest version for Jaunty. It didn't finish properly having a problem installing the msfonts. I saw on the Wine site that others were having a problem with the same thing. I followed instructions from someone on the forum about updating and upgrading jaunty manually. I did this and Wine runs but, launching programs through it is very slow and holds up other processes. I tried to Login to my account at WineHQ but, for some reason my username and password are not recognized. I think that for me Wine is just too problematic and I will have to look elsewhere for answers. I know the guys at Wine try to get things going and for that I admire their perseverance in providing a possible solution for many...

[D-cat]

I used winetools to install a lot of things almost automagically. Typically, installing things like the fonts is a one-time shot, then you're good to go.

While wine attempts to not be so much an emulator but rather a compatibility layer between Windows programs and Linux functions, there are just some things that require emulating (or out right faking) that make programs that use these functions run slower (about 1/4 speed in my estimation... which makes sense) via wine than on a native Windows machine. There's nothing really to be done about it, the fact that some of these programs (especially IE dependent ones) work at all is amazing. Crappy programming that requires write privleges to system files will never install or run right, that's just security.

Alternatively, you can run a virtual machine like VMWare or VirtualBox with Windows as a guest, and programs will run natively in those. OpenSource versions of both are available from the repos (check Synaptic Package Manager).

If you're trying to dump MS in its entirety yet still run Windows based programs, you can take a look at ReactOS, still in Alpha but the progress is amazing. (Note the latest version (0.3.10 - July 5, 2009) requires a PIII at minimum due to a recent library update. They're working on fixing it for older processors. You can get 0.3.9 if needed from their sourceforge site.)

[Dougal]

Thanks for the input d-cat. I will look at both suggestions. It would be great to run Linux fulltime at work with the ability to switch momentarily to a Windows program.