On 01 Sep 2001 20:22:33 -0500, Brian S Carter-Stiglitz wrote: > Anyone tried Win4Lin? Any general opinions on it? How much does it slow > down the average windoze prgram? any shouts for its competitors? I occasionally use Win4Lin, for MS Office or a couple of Windows-only apps that I need for work. As far as I can tell, it doesn't slow down programs *at all*. In fact, it seems to run faster than "native" Windows on the same system. I suspect this is because Linux has a better/faster filesystem, so hard drive I/O is more efficient. I've got enough RAM that swapping isn't an issue, but programs just launch quicker, which is of course disk-intensive. Win4Lin creates a virtual machine for Windows to run on: all hardware is really just a set of software-hooks into the Linux kernel. But because of this, some Windows functionality is not available: no DirectX (who cares?), no Network Neighborhood (but standard TCP/IP networking works fine -- web, email, ftp, etc.). Some of this may have changed with Win4Lin version 3.0, but I only have version 2.02. Win4Lin also only supports Windows 9x, but not NT/2000/XP. The general opinions I have read are that VMWare has better support for all of Windows' functionality, while Win4Lin is easier on system resources. I ran Win4Lin on 64 MB just fine for some time -- 24 MB were dedicated to Windows when it was running, 40 MB were left for Linux to use. No problems at all, although perhaps my swapping increased. VMWare won't even run on less than 128 MB, and even then it's a dog. Of course, with RAM being so cheap right now (I just bought a 256 MB SDRAM strip for $27 at Tran Micro -- 1/10 of the price I paid two years ago), that's not as much of an issue. Hope this helps, Dave