VirtualBox and Wine

There are times when you just need a Windows app. Thankfully those times are becoming more rare, but until they're gone there are two good solutions to this problem.

First is VirtualBox. If you have the RAM and a legal copy of M$ XP this is a great way to go. The latest version is much better than earlier versions and with it's seamless window mode you can pretend you don't even have XP installed. It's compatibility is great. All but DirectX works exactly as it should. No need to purchase parrallels or VMware, this opensource app does what it says.

Link: http://www.virtualbox.org/

The downside of VirtualBox is you have to run all of Windows inside of your linux machine and then run the app you want. This means giving up a major amount of RAM and some system CPU cycles just to get your app. Mostly I do not mind, but if it's on my notebook and all I want is to run my Teacher Marks program this is an unnecessary pain. Enter WINE

WINE is an opensource project that has written the Windows APIs from scratch on their own. This means you can install Windows apps without having Windows installed. This is great in theory but not yet in practice. I find myself editing by hand just too many times. Perhaps when this hits 2.0 it will be usable by the average joe.

Link: http://www.winehq.org/

If you have the cash, then you could look at codeweavers crossover office. That is what wine should be like. Easily install most windows programs. All from nice friendly wizard driven installs. No hacking, no command line. I wish they had a version that was pay as you go. Maybe $5.00 a program or something. At $100.00 it's simply out of my league (price at the local store, looks like only $70.00 online). Still, OpenOffice 3 isn't out so if you must have M$ Office 2007 installed, this works very well. A bit weird running windows stuff straight in Linux though :)

Link: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxlinux/