WINE alternative
 

Is there any other program, besides WINE and DOSbox that can run Windows proprams within Linux? I have to run a very simple utility that is only abailable for Windows and does not run in DOS mode and WINE for some odd reason has trouble with (it runs, but doesn't fully work, and returns 0 error messages).

You can take a look at Cedega by TransGaming, but it is not free, and is geared towards games. There is also Crossover Linux by Codeweavers, bit it als isn't free.

Using Wine you can experiment with the winecfg command. It pops up a GUI app that allows you to configure a few things. For example, you can select the windows version: Windows XP, Windows 2000, etc.

Also, if it's a console command, the wineconsole command gives better results than wine.

Have you tried running your utility from a console ? You get back lots of messages you won't normally see if you run

wine <your.exe>

or according to a previous post ( I've never done it )

wineconsole <your.exe>

Also make sure you're running the latest wine. If your distro is more than one or two releases behind I'd either try adding wine's own distributions from their site, or downloading and compiling the latest source from them from

http://www.winehq.org/site/download

Also if you're missing any dll files you can get them from

http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/index.shtml

Good luck,

Greg

PS: The winehq link as links to the other Wine clones

they are both based on WINE....

With Crossover at least, there are some things that will work that will not work with WINE. They have a free trial, so you might want to test it.

Hi,

You might try playing around with different versions of Wine. Something they might fix in one release may have broken compatibility with something else in another release. Maybe do a search for your program + wine, and see if someone else got it to work with a different version. Then try the same version.

Sam

qemu is a nice windows emulator, but you have to install the whole os to run apps

is 'qemu' like VMware then?

yes, there is Xen too, provided your CPU has hardware virtualization support (Vanderpool or Pacifica)

I knew about Xen, but i have never heard of 'qemu'. sounds interesting

Now you are not talking emulators---things like qemu, xen, VMware are virtual machine programs---they still require you to install Windows. But, yes, they are the ultimate alternative if your favorite thing won't run on some form of WINE.

But...

The virtual machine emulation are much more resource intensive than the program level emulation. But not all things will run in things like WINE

Yes with an emu you have to install windows, and then every time you want to use it you must wait for windows to boot up. Also some VMs don't allow you to store data outside of their windows 'image'.

If you can get wine or similar working that is preferable.

I don't know about other solutions, but VMware has a suspend feature that basically captures the current state of the VM and freeze it. Later, it can be resumed in a few seconds.
There is always the samba option as long as there is networking support =).

Qemu has a run option (-smb) that allows you to specify a path to be available in the running OS as a "virtual" SMB share. It also has the suspend option and with kqemu, about 6 months ago I had it running Windows XP at near native speeds.

It slowed down considerably when trying to use the then experimental USB support but that could have been fixed by now, who knows.