Hello!

Mac OS X has this neat program called Parallels Desktop, which lets you run Windows programs in an emulator, without having the Windows desktop running. Ie you just see the programs, theyre not locked inside a window.

I think I've read about a similar application for Linux, not WINE (as it only runs some apps) but a full-featured emulation software.

Does anyone know of Ive dreamt it all or if there is such an application?

virtual box is one virtualbox parallels is available for linux also

thanks, but does the Parallel version or VirtualBox support running programs without having to use them within the emulator Window.

What I'm after is an emulator that can integrate the apps so they run like WINE's apps

This is a thing that is not possible (yet) in linux. It is hard to integrate it into a program like parralels in a linux environment because no linux is the same and neither is the hardware of it. On Mac you have one operating system so the programmers can build it with that in mind knowing that every mac is the same.

But ... linux is big, and is still growing so this will be possible in the future. I agree it would be very useful and cool! What would be even cooler is like the mono project but it would be really cool if mono would allow native windows applications to run on linux with the use of GTK on the fly.

You have to realize that Windows runs Windows softwares and Linux runs Linux softwares...

I have never tried Parallels Desktop, but I believe it works like virtualbox, vmware, and qemu to some extent etc. And differently from wine.

In wine, you do not need to install MS Windows it tries to have linux understand what the windows program wants.

Parallels, Virtualbox, vmware, and qemu emulate a machine, a PC for example, on which you can install a different OS. The trick is that both OSes run at the same time on the same machine. Plus, if you have virtualization (Parallels, Virtualbox, vmware, Qemu+kqemu/kvm) the guest OS can use the real hardware and not an emulated one, and runs faster.

In this case, Windows softwares run in Windows, and Windows runs in Linux. (Whereas with Wine, Windows apps run in Linux, which is a bit incestuous and so it does not always work.)

The trick you see often is to maximize the window containing the guest OS and have Windows XP not display the desktop, this way, it feels like both OSes merge. It is only a visual trick: you cannot see it but it is there. And another trick is to use rdesktop to start guest-OS apps from within host-OS.

Only tricks.

Windows apps will never run natively on Linux.

Now if you would say what Windows apps you want, there are possibly linux alternatives. If you are into games, you can try cedega.

Have a look at wikipedia on virtualization, etc.