Hey guys,

I've tried running Windows XP in linux on Qemu, it installed perfectly, but when I try to run certain programs they crash and when i try to install certain applications they say "couldn't ____ DLL" and such. Is there a better virtual machine to run windows on?

Thanks!
George

At this time, I (sadly) doubt you'll find anything more usable than VMware.

But Xen is very likely the future. It's development keeps boosting and it's already very useful. It still can't run Windows on all hardware though (only the newest chips), but that should change in the future. As for VMWare, they do have a free(only as in beer) server version (never tried it though).

So... at this time, VMWare is the only thing that really works for me on the desktop but I'm already looking forward to replace it with Xen in the (hopefully) near future.

George,

Have you tried W2K under QEMU? Supposedly faster than XP.

And did you run the kqemu accelerator module?

I've run Adobe PageMaker 7.0 and Photoshop 7.0, as well
as some lesser known apps, under QEMU with no crashes and
good performance. I was using it on an AMD 2600+ Barton with
512K L2 cache using 1GB of 333Mhz RAM.

Have yet to install it on this box which replaced that one,
with an AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200+ with 1MB L2 cache
and 1GB dual channel 400Mhz RAM.

You don't list your distribution, so I'll not say anything
about the benefits of running it under Slackware, nor where
you can find packages and build directories with the source.

Bruce

If all you want to do is run one or two apps (and assuming you're on a 386 machine), then you should look at trying to get them to run under Wine first. No need to run full emulation and second OS if you don't have to, after all. And Wine has been really started improving rapidly now that it's gone to a beta release cycle. Instability and bugginess can still be problems, however.

Other than that, the only other Free emulator I know of is Bochs, and there's also Win4Lin on the commercial front. I've never tried either of them though, so I have no idea how well they work.

I run win98 under Win4Lin on my servers at work with 100% results. I've never actually tried Win XP but Win4Lin has had XP support for several releases & they claim it works perfectly.

It is a commercial app but is not very expensive & well worth the cash.

Check it out at www.win4lin.com

I am pretty antagonistic to running Windows apps on Linux at all. Assuming you're dual boot, if you need to run a Windows program, switch to Windows. I have found that there are equally good replacements for 90+ percent of Windows apps, and Games (not a consideration for me) evidently don't run correctly under any emulation.

I do contract work using MS Access, and I still haven't been able to switch from my Windows .wav file editor (Goldwave), but apart from those 2 programs, I can't remember the last time I booted up Windows.

I agree that it's better to use native Linux apps than emulating Windows, but I'd rather have a person run Linux and emulate the apps than not to switch at all. Let's face it, there are some people who have apps they just cannot or will not give up. We shouldn't expect them to just drop everything right away. I personally had to slowly wean myself off of a few apps I really loved using under Windows, and there are still a couple I can't do without even now.

And don't forget the convenience factor in emulation. Dual-booting is much more of a pain than opening up an emulated window. Besides, it helps the Linux "can-do" image when it can not only run programs written for a completely different platform, but the actual platform itself! ;-)

But in the end I think Wine is really the best way to go overall. Rather than emulating a whole PC, where you still need to have a licenced copy of Windows, you can take just the apps you need and run them semi-natively. Give them another year or two and I'm sure that it will be good enough that almost anyone who needs to run just a program or two will be able to do it.

I couldn't agree more rickh but this is only possible when you only need to load the apps when you want to use them, which is what you can get away with. But this theory comes crashing down with servers that need to run several different services all day every day! So when I finally convinced my boss that we would be better off migrating to Linux powered servers, we obviously ended up with a much better system even with a few extra features, but there was one very specific app that we have been using for years & can't do without. And dual-booting was not an option because Linux needs to run the mail, ftp, internet, file, etc. servers all day long but we also need to run this windoes app all day long as well! And wine is good but it doesn't run everything & has a few performance issues.

So basically, if you need a windoes app, don't notice any performance problems & need it running at the same time as all your Linux apps then windoes in a virtual environment is the best thing for it!

The other free emulator is VMplayer , it comes with some prebuilt evnviroments but its easy to add your own, I had win98 running on an XP system and there is a linux version.

IMHO wine, although GREAT for a lot of programs, currently isn't an ideal solution. In many cases it's difficult to get individual programs working, and even then a lot of functionality just doesn't isn't there.

With that said, if you have one or two programs to run, wine is DEFINITELY worth taking a look into. If you need a lot of windows programs to work I'd use a dual boot or VMWare, with a strong preference toward VMWare (rebooting into windows to use one program is a pain). I've used VMWare on other systems and have never seen a problem with it -- it interacts with the hardware VERY well, and all programs seem to run as they would in native windows. The only issue I've seen is that when running cpufreq in on-demand mode everything runs really slow (as if the demand of VMWare isn't registered), switching to performance mode (ideally in a script) solves that problem though.

I've been running Linux for over three years now, and there are only two windows programs that I use (dvd shrink and picasa). These just work better than any other equivalent programs I've seen for Windows or Linux. Both of these work great in wine. For most other windows applications, I've found Linux equivalents that were as good, or better than the windows versions.

I know I jumped around a lot in that, but I hope it helped.