VMware on Ubuntu?

[Bob Nielsen]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 09:04:54AM +0100, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> > ...recently installed Win4Lin Home Edition ($30) in warty 
> > and after a few initial stumbles setting
> > things up it appears to be working fairly well 
> > for most apps, although I get an error when I try to run Tax Cut.
> 
> 30 USD is affordable if it works. Would you be so kind as to make (or
> send info for someone else to make it) a page on the Wiki to detail all
> that you had to do to get it working ?
> 
> I think that helping newbies like me to run their windows apps, is a
> great way to help people migrate to Ubuntu.
> 
> In my particular case, I really need to get Dreamweaver working, as
> there is nothing like it for Linux yet. Quanta is starting to look
> interesting, but there is still years of work to do, and of course, it
> would also need to be converted to a Gnome app, widgets, icons, dialog
> boxes...

Well, I haven't mastered the art of wiki-writing but here is what I can
recall (I didn't make any notes at the time, but my short-term memory
isn't too bad yet, although at the age of 66 I suspect it isn't quite
what it used to be):

I couldn't find it on the Netraverse site, but Google took me to 
<http://www.win4lin.com/redirects/win4linhome.html>.  

I downloaded (after paying the $30) the installer, which is a .tgz file. 
It contained a large PDF file of instructions for installation and
operation, as well as a binary which is used to install the system. 
After the initial stages, it found that I did not have a kernel with the
patches for Win4Lin.  I then had the choice of patching virgin
(kernel.org) source or downloading one of their kernels.  I chose the
latter, as they had a 2.6.8.1 kernel-image available.  It was in rpm
format, so I converted it to a .deb with alien, installed it and
hand-patched grub so I could boot with the new kernel (the image is
called win4lin rather than vmlinuz-xxx, so update-grub didn't work).

I rebooted the computer and noticed a few errors related to a 
device-mapper and dm-linear, neither of which I recognized but the 
errors don't seem to cause any problems.  I restarted the installer and 
it worked fine, allowing me to install Windows 98SE and even booted 
Windows at the end of the process.

When I rebooted again, I found that Win4Lin wouldn't start.  It had 
loaded the initscript in /etc/rc.d/init.d (?) so I moved it to 
/etc/init.d and ran update-rc.d to create the /etc/rc2.d symlink.

Now it would run.  There are two ways to start Win4Lin.  One can run 
"win &" from a terminal in X and it runs like any other X application.  
It can also be started with "fwin -auth" from a virtual console which 
starts a second X session (on alt-F8) and allows one to switch between 
X, Win4Lin or a VC.  It is necessary to add a line 

option "backingstore"

to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 or the Windows application will not be restored 
when switching to another console and back.

As I said previously, Tax Cut (a program for calculating U.S. Income 
Tax) doesn't seem to work (I get an error about one of the .dll files), 
but I haven't determined if that is a deficiency in Win4Lin.  Quicken 
2004 seems to work fine and I haven't yet tried any other Windows 
programs.  

I used an earlier version of Win4Lin as well as VMWare a few years ago
and found that Win4Lin was more responsive on the K6-350 box I was using
at the time, but not all Windows applications would work.  It was much
more compatible than Wine, however.  Win4Lin apparently only works with
Windows 95/98/ME, not XP.

VMWare was compatible with any Windows (or Linux) software I tried on
it, although it was rather sluggish on that machine (which I think had
128 MB of RAM--more would have helped).

There is a good description on installing Win4Lin plus some techniques 
for integrating it into a Gnome desktop at 
<http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/06/10/win4lin.html>.

There are a few limitations to the "Home Edition" of Win4Lin.  It can
only use winsock2 networking, which won't work with Network Neighborhood
and won't do network printing.  It costs $30, compared to $90 for the
full version which does virtual networking (this $30 be applied to an
upgrade to the full version).  As a comparison, VMWare Workstation 4
costs $189.

Bob