Hi Everyone

I have an XP/Linux dual boot system, and wish to be able to run Windows apps from Linux. My windows partitions are NTFS

I've heard that simply installing VMware under Linux will do the trick. But does anyone know if it supports reading and writing to NTFS partitions? Although I don't really care about being able to write files to these partitions while running Linux, I'm just afraid that some Windows apps may write temp files to these partitions in order to be able to function properly. And I know that Linux's native NTFS support is readonly.

Any ideas on how to achieve this would be great

cheers
Michael

You can't write to NTFS, but you can run windows programs.
The program you'll need is called wine, search here for wine and you'll find a zillion threads about it.
But instead of running windows apps, you can always search for a free and often better alternative

I've heard of other programs then Wine that are much more better. Try doing a search for it in the Linux Software board.

There is a Linux version of VMware. It is fairly expensive at about $300 unless you have a student ID card and can get the student version. It allows Windows, DOS or other operating systems to be booted-up and run from within Linux. I am not sure if that is actually what you want to do or not? When Windows is being run from within Linux I do not know exactly how the partitons are handled. After booting up into Linux or whatever your main operating sytem is you would then next need to boot Windows up in a Window. VMware does not yet support all the latest versions of Linux as either hosts or guests. It supports Red Hat 8.0 but not 9 for instance.

There is anther version of VMware that I have used in a class I took. We used Windows XP as the host operating system and ran Red Hat 7.3 and Windows 2000 as the guest operating systems. In class we created and formated an imaginary virtual harddrive with partions on that and installed Linux on that. To use VMware you would not only need VMware but would need to own a copy of Windows too.

I do not have VMware installed at home. I do have Crossover Office intalled however. It costs about $60 and is more or less sort of wine enhancement software. It allows me to run Word 97, Excel 97 and Quciken 2002 under Linux. It does a great job of running Word 97 and Excel 2000. I have not yet used the Quicken much. Crossover office only allows running certain versions of some Windows programs. It will not all you to run everything!

VMware will not help in your particular situation because the only way to access the Windows data would be through a raw disk VM, which would be messy at best for a WinXP system. I have not tried it myself, but I would assume the read/write abilities are dependant on the host OS. linux can be recompliled with NTFS write capabilites, but this is listed as DANGEROUS in the kernel config.