Study: Linux sales down, but not out

CNET News.com ^ | August 6, 2002, 4:40 PM PT | Stephen Shankland

[btcusn]

As a home user, there is ONE windows program that I need to run. Win4Lin allows me to run Quicken wirh all functions enabled, including home banking. I was never able to get Quicken to run properly using wine. Only time my Mandrake 8.2 box goes down is when the power goes out.
Set up as a firewall/dsl router ans samba server. When running Win4Lin, the virtual win98 box shows up on my sons box as a normal 98 box with full file and print sharing enabled. Only thing not supported is Direct X, which needs hardware access.

Jack

[mykej]

"Every few days? Man that'd be great! I run WIN98 2nd Ed and it locks up in less than 24hrs. I hate it!"

Win2k admittly is much better. It can often go 48 hours without losing its mind.

"I've heard that you can actually run windows on top of Linux and if it locks up, you can close it like a program and then reopen it."

Yeah, VMWare rocks. It doesn't emulate windows, it emulates an entire computer. You can install and run anything that runs on Intel like hardware under VMWare.

"Although if you're running Linux, I can't see why you'd want to run windows also. "

I do some consulting on stuff that runs on Win2k or Solaris. Since Sparcbooks cost a fortune, I run linux on a laptop and use VMWare for the win2k software. Since it's network dependant software, I can test configurations on the "network" that exists between the physical machine and the virtual machine running the software. Spiffy.