Virtual Win32 apps on Linux and Mac
Hi Guys,
I've been looking into Codeweavers for Mac and wine for Linux to run some windows applications that our users have to have but there are no ports available. I don't want to use Citrix because I need to support offline laptops (plus cost & complexity), and I don't want to use VMWare because I need to buy another OS copy and its pretty confusing for a non-technical user and some of our PCs just don't have the RAM and horsepower. Wine has it's share of compatability issues, but for many apps it works great. We are using Thinstall on our windows boxes to deploy a lot of apps in virtualized format, and I saw a demo of Thinstall running on top of wine where the exact same Office 2003 package could be cached or streamed to a Linux or Windows desktop and my jaw dropped. :) Supposedly this works on MacOS as well. Has anyone tried this yet? It looks extremely simple... The Thinstall folks said it works but wasn't officially supported yet, I'm guessing this means there are known issues.
Do you know if any other solution works on Linux or Mac? I'm pretty sure SVS/Softgrid can't do this because they use filter drivers and wine doesn't emulate drivers, but what about Trigence - I've heard their name pop up once in a while in conjunction wtih linux...
Jerry
I've been looking into Codeweavers for Mac and wine for Linux to run some windows applications that our users have to have but there are no ports available. I don't want to use Citrix because I need to support offline laptops (plus cost & complexity), and I don't want to use VMWare because I need to buy another OS copy and its pretty confusing for a non-technical user and some of our PCs just don't have the RAM and horsepower. Wine has it's share of compatability issues, but for many apps it works great. We are using Thinstall on our windows boxes to deploy a lot of apps in virtualized format, and I saw a demo of Thinstall running on top of wine where the exact same Office 2003 package could be cached or streamed to a Linux or Windows desktop and my jaw dropped. :) Supposedly this works on MacOS as well. Has anyone tried this yet? It looks extremely simple... The Thinstall folks said it works but wasn't officially supported yet, I'm guessing this means there are known issues.
Do you know if any other solution works on Linux or Mac? I'm pretty sure SVS/Softgrid can't do this because they use filter drivers and wine doesn't emulate drivers, but what about Trigence - I've heard their name pop up once in a while in conjunction wtih linux...
Jerry
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Posted by:
kkaminsk
17 years ago
I've never heard much in terms of overall success in this arena. I think one of the key issues is translating all those Win32 APIs into something Linux / Unix can digest. The most successful solution by far is along the lines of Parallels but you have to wonder what kind of business case would force you into that situation because you still need to patch / manage both OSes and in your case the hardware requirements are an issue.
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