** raph@panache.demon.co.uk raph@panache.demon.co.uk [2003-05-29 09:07]:
Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful?
In practial terms, I think that Wine has been overtaken by VMWare. I know that Wine is free and VMWare is not, but VMWare works. AFAIK Wine never quite made it to proper functionality and VMWare does so much more at a very reasonable price.
** end quote [raph@panache.demon.co.uk]
VMWare is a virtual PC environment and costs $299(usd) plus the cost of the Windows license to run in the environment (there is also a version that will run Linux from within Windows - in fact I don't think you are limited to running Windows, you could run another Linux if you wanted). http://www.vmware.com/
WINE maps the Windows API calls onto Linux native calls, and is free. It is progressing, and does do pretty well considering it is aiming at a moving target controlled my Microsoft. http://www.winehq.org/
If you want to run Microsoft Office, IE, or a number of other Windows applications you could look at Crossover Office. This is a commercial product based on WINE (and I believe contributing back to the WINE project) http://www.codeweavers.com/
There is also Win4Lin which is similar to VMWare, but a bit cheaper (around $90usd). It also needs (last time I looked) a bit of kernel recompilation to get it working. http://www.netraverse.com/
Not that I've had direct experience of anything other than VMWare. I was planning to purchase a license and downloaded an evaluation a while back. It worked pretty well, but they went and changed their product range. IIRC they upped the prices and introduced a Lite version that only supported Windows 95 and 98 - since I didn't want to be restricted on the Windows version I could run I wavered on the new version - long enough for them to discontinue it! The price of the current version is way over the top for my requirements so I've abandoned the idea.