Win4lin Download
Win4Lin Pro Desktop is the flagship product in the Win4Lin family of integrated Windows-on-Linux solutions which enables Linux user to runs Windows 2000/XP applications and desktop as intended in ‘real’ Windows at near-native speed, without the need to patch the host operating system (e.g. No need to patch the Linux kernel), on top of a Linux operating system. Tom’s Hardware then install Win4Lin Pro Desktop on Fedora Core 5 as reference (host) system detailing system requirements and limitations of Win4Lin, plus tips and benchmarking results, and concludes in the review that whether Win4Lin can completely replace a native Windows installation remains to be seen.
For low-intensity exercises like Microsoft Office interaction it does pretty well, but propagation delays owing to operating Windows within Linux may be problematic for professional graphics designers. Image editing and manipulation programs like Adobe Photoshop or Jasc Paintshop are resource-intensive and can fully exercise underlying hardware resources even for moderate tasks. That said, either dual-boot configurations or substantial hardware investment will produce the best results for such applications.Full Review (link dead).
To get the most from this Recipe, read Part One first. Also, you must have Linux running on a system before you can install Win4Lin. Assuming you've done both, let's jump in.The following is a rough summary of what's described in the Win4Lin docs. This is intended to give you an idea of what you are doing; for more precise information, read the manual. Also, if you are reading the manual from Acrobat for Linux (as you should be), don't worry about starting X-Windows; it's already up.Win4Lin InstallationI. CD Version:. Get your Windows installation CD and the unlock code ready.
Put the Win4Lin CD in the computer's drive, then open it from Linux. (The specifics depend on your Linux distribution.) Open the installation manual PDF from Adobe Acrobat on your Linux desktop.
Do whatever the prompts tell you to do. Anything you don't understand, you should be able to get from the installation manual or from this article.II. Downloadable version:.
Get your Windows installation CD or boot floppy, and the unlock code, ready. Open your Web browser from Linux, and go to the. Buy a registration code for $90. Create a directory for the installer. /win4lin-install is a good name for it. Download the installation PDF. The installer first checks to see if the installer itself is current, then it asks whether or not the user wants to download the files required to install Win4Lin.
Select Next to download the files. You will see two progress bars as illustrated in the image, one for the Win4Lin file, the second for the kernel if you need to install one. The first file is Win4Lin, about 2 MB; the second is around 16 MB.If the download is interrupted for any reason, then the installer will crash without warning or visible onscreen indication. If the modem lights aren't flashing and/or the installer progress bar doesn't move after a few minutes, log out of the system to the login prompt and restart it. If you know how to use the ps and kill commands, find the installer process and kill -9 it instead.Once you're back up, reconnect to your ISP and restart the installer. The installer will check the files, finish downloading Win4lin, and start downloading the modified kernel, if required.Once the Win4Lin software is installed, you will be prompted to perform the steps required to install Windows. Once the Windows files are loaded, the Windows installation process will take place as you remember it, only faster.
What is particularly significant about the above is that three out of the four programs shown do not work with Wine/Codeweavers Windows emulation.Don't assume that you automatically need to reinstall all the old Windows applications from your old Windows environment. Remember, the idea is to learn Linux. So use Linux applications in preference to Windows applications whenever possible. Also, the more applications you can run from Linux, the more productive you are likely to be when the Windows part of the system is too busy executing operations to accept any input from you.That said, your Windows OS will be quite a bit stabler than it used to be once you find a significant number of Linux replacements - ideally, ports of your Windows software - running in place of Windows applications.Every application that is running as native Linux instead of in Windows is not consuming Windows resources. Having two dozen subwindows in Opera open doesn't destabilize Linux significantly.
But not having it run in Windows stabilized the legacy OS quite a bit.If you've had your Windows environment for any length of time, you also have many desktop icons attached to programs or files/directories, but no idea exactly why you decided to put them there because you haven't used them in years. The next screen shot shows my old Windows desktop. See what I mean? Like a move, this gives you a chance to leave behind a lot of accumulated dross. Install the handful of applications you really need immediately, along with a few files/folders relating to current projects, and install only what you need when you need it. Also, check for Linux applications first if you think you need to install a Linux application when time allows.
There is also a good chance that many of the major applications you depend on will be ported or that Linux applications with acceptable functionality and legacy compatibility will appear. Your distribution probably has a whole lot of applications you haven't installed available for download and a setup for automatically downloading and installing them. Find out what it is, and learn how to use it.Here are the main differences between Win4Lin/Windows and a native Windows installation:.
Win4Lin can't access your video accelerator chip yet. So video playback will be a lot more pixellated. (Remember to install DirectX 8.0 anyway.).
The Windows file system is now a subset of the main Linux file system. What Linux sees as: /home/username/win is seen as C:%5C drive to Windows. If you need to use a Windows program to operate on files originated using Linux software, then the file will have to be placed into the Windows filesystem to allow a Windows program to have access to it. If you're inside the Windows environment, and accessing files from a 'Open File' box or a DOS prompt, C: path filename.ext is still correct. If you want to access that file from a Linux application, it's /home/username/win/path/filename.ext, and note that backslash directory indicators are forward slashes / in Linux. Anybody who has had a Windows environment for a few years has tuned it in all sorts of ways, from adding updated systems components to lots and lots of personal configuration settings.
Your new Windows install is exactly that, a new install. You'll have to put many of these components back in over time and in many cases, you'll have to remember how you did made it work last time.
The learning curve for Windows was very significant, too, it just happened so long ago that you've probably forgotten.The Linux GUI maps Control-Alt-Delete to logout/shutdown.The following will explain how to reclaim that keystroke combination for Win4Lin/Windows. Before you start using Win4Lin, go IMMEDIATELY to Start Preferences Control Center Regional and Accessibility Keyboard Shortcuts Logout custom (button). Click on the button, which will say Cntr-Alt-Del. Then hit Alt-Delete. You won't be able to function in Windows without the ability to check or shut down individual crashed applications. The best Windows file manager for the Win4Lin environment appears to be.Windows Explorer.
My favorite Windows third-party file managers, X-Files and PowerDesk, take forever to load and tend to use most/all CPU resources when doing this. Windows Explorer comes right up. Reinstall your firewall before you go online for the first time. I am still running. Reinstall whatever security apps you use in the Windows environment. Your virus scanner may work a bit differently than usual, as file formats have been changed and some forms of malware written for DOS/Windows can not work in the Win4Lin/Windows environment. Most of the time, Windows operations seem to run a bit slower than they do on a comparable machine.
However, this makes a difference to me because I've got an older machine with a Duron 900. Individual apps appear to consume fewer system resources than they did under a pure Windows system. This is especially evident when printing. Memory seems to leak more slowly as well. While you probably can't see it in the screen shot below, my Windows session has been running for hours, I've got lots of high-resource demand applications running, and the Resource Meter in the Systray is at 23 percent. Perhaps more important, the more high-resource-demand applications one can run outside Windows, the more stable it will be. So my web browsers (Opera and sometimes Mozilla) now run on the Linux side.
Crashes can be just as catastrophic, so remember to back up. However you can keep right on working in Linux when this happens. Your ability to restore your /mnt/(backupdrivename)/home/(username)/win/windows installation can be a lifesaver just as it is for a standard Windows installation.I've used 98lite for years to remove Microsoft Internet Explorer from my Windows environment for stability and security reasons. The arguments for and against running IE as part of a Windows installation apply to running one in Win4Lin, too.
While the 98lite for extracting Internet Explorer from Windows does not work because it calls for a DOS video type not supported in Win4Lin, the IEradicator script for removing IE does. If you choose to do this, you can get the MS installer script.Here is a screen shot of the new Win4Lin/Windows desktop running over Linux shortly after installation. BackupsWindows backups do not work with the Win4Lin environment. Whatever Windows on Win4Lin thinks, you no longer have access to a DOS/Windows file system. The good news is, neither do viruses.While one can transfer the data from your Linux drive to a mirror drive by simply doing a cp operation, to make a bootable drive clone as you can a Windows drive is a far more complex problem. One would automatically have to create a set of drive partitions identical to that of the drive to be cloned, then stuff the right data into each partition. There are packages that will copy everything, including partitions, but I did not test them for this Recipe.I'm also looking for a Linux equivalent of ZipBackup to allow converting the contents of my Linux drive to archivally compressed DVD-R size chunks.To back up to a blank hard drive available from Linux, first:cd /mntmake the new directory to mount the backup drive to:mkdir linuxbackupfollow these instructions from from Steps 1 to 5.For this, you only need a single Linux partition.
To mount the backup drive once it's formatted:mount - t ext2 /dev/hdd1 /mnt/linuxbackuplinuxbackup means whatever you thought was a good volume name for your backup drive. The rest of the About.com article isn't relevant, since you're creating a data drive, not a boot drive. If you are using ext3 or other kind of filesystem instead of ext2, type in the right filesystem descriptor instead.Get help with respect to the fdisk part if you have any doubts of your being able to carry it through once you've gotten to the menu part of fdisk.cp is like the DOS copy command:cp -au -reply=yes /bin /dev /home /lib /misc /opt /root /selinux /tmp /var /boot /etc /initrd /lost found /proc /sbin /sys /usr /mnt/linuxbackupcp is in source-destination format. Everything before the /new-disk is source. So the command means to copy updated files recursively (down the directory tree) from your working Linux drive to the backup drive linuxbackup.mounted temporarily as a directory in the Linux filesystem and write new ones where they don't already exist.Note: /win4lin-download is where I put the Netraverse downloads. The CD may install it somewhere else; if that happens, either change /win4lin-download to fit, or, if it's a subdirectory of any of the listed directories, omit it.To restore an entire drive, install or reinstall Linux to a drive, mount your backup drive as described above, cd to it, and then:cp -au -reply=yes /bin /dev /home /lib /misc /opt /root /selinux /tmp /var /boot /etc /initrd /lost found /proc /sbin /sys /usr// is itself a directory name, of the top-level directory.
The command says take the listed main directories from the main directory tree on the linux backup drive - not mentioned because you are doing this from that drive - to the directory / on your primary Linux drive.The list between - au and / should include all the top-level directories of your hard drive except /proc and /mnt., /proc contains temporary processes, and /mnt contains the drives that are temporarily mounted/unmounted, including your backup drive.You don't want to copy a hard drive into itself. This is why you leave /mnt out of the restore command.Remaining ProblemsThese are the most important problems I've found with this combination as installed:. The installer needs to be stabilized so it can tolerate a disconnection from the dialup or network without crashing. The installer should also provide a definite indication to the user that the file transfer isn't happening.
The installer UI should make it clearer what options are enabled or disabled. A checkbox with a big X in it may be prosaic, but it is clear and unambiguous. Do all the GUI programs required to configure a Linux install have to be scattered between System Tools, System Settings, and Preferences submenus? This, however, is a problem with Fedora Core 2 and other Linux distributions, not specifically with Win4Lin. But this isn't really much worse than in Windows, a lot of the Windows learning curve consists of figuring out how to find the menus. Notice the number of configuration files one has to open from a command-line text editor a terminal session? People like us who have to be early adopters are used to be stuff that's rough around the edges.
But before this becomes a mass-market product, these problems need to be fixed, so our customers will come to us when the GUI applications break, not because they need help with routine installation.ConclusionsBelow, a screen shot showing what my Linux / Win4Lin desktop looks like now. Eye candy aside, this is more functional than the Windows Desktop it replaces. My most used applications are in the taskbar, but only the needed ones are started at startup. The taskbar program tabs stay the same size regardless of the number of GUI programs running. The clock is a lot more visible than it used to be.
Once the setup is done, it all works very well. I think it was completely worth the effort. While dialing in this system was not easy, now I no longer have to devote the average of half an hour a day to rebooting or changing Windows system settings to keep it operational. Nor do I have to put up with the intense annoyance at the inability to do anything useful while putting in this penalty time.If you try this, you should have a far easier time than I did, since you'll have this Recipe to refer to. The problems discussed here will be fixed over time.
Vmware Workstation
Meantime, this article is written for those of us who will actually have to know how Linux desktops work, including the guts which our users will come to us for help with when point-and-click stops working - just as they do with Windows now.Sidebar: Where To Go If You Run Into Trouble. Check the vendor site first.
The answer may already be in a searchable KnowledgeBase, FAQ, or other documentation on the site. Google is your friend.
There is much useful documentation available at the. Also check out. Post questions in places like, (if you use Fedora Core), or Usenet groups like or subgroups. There are many Linux Web forums and vendor-specific mailing lists. Google can help you find them, too. Ask a knowledgeable friend or local Linux User Group (LUG). There's a list of LUGs.
If you bought a distribution or application that includes support, call the vendor. Win4Lin includes support. But first make sure your problem is with Win4Lin, not Windows, your Windows application, or the Linux distribution underlying Win4Lin. Check vendor and open-source developer sites for user and developer forums. Your question may have already been answered.
Win4lin Free Download Ubuntu
If not, post a new question. Visit TechBuilder's, and post a question for your fellow system builders.This is Part Two of a two-part Recipe. View Part One.A. LIZARD is an Internet consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area who has written for technology magazines and Web sites since 1987. He thanks Maxtor and Netraverse for contributing a pair of hard drives and a review copy of Win4Lin, respectively, for use in this Recipe.Discuss this Recipe with other system builders in the TechBuilder.