Sunday, February 20, 2005

More Good News on the Multi-Platform Front A lot of people haven't made the leap to the Linux desktop out of fear. Fear that the environment would be too alien, that they'd have to learn entirely new ways of doing things, or just that they'd have to abandon the programs they know. In recent years, the volunteer-based Wine emulator project and two commercial entities, CodeWeavers and NeTraverse, have offered a halfway house solution for many of these users: the chance to run standard Windows applications under Linux. In the last couple years, all these projects have been increasingly burdened by the reality that the Wine project's code was based on Windows 98, making some Windows apps behave squirrelly, and others (chiefly MS Office 2003) not at all. This week, that may have changed. Win4Lin Pro was announced at LinuxWorld Wednesday and should be in general release February 23. This product claims to have breached the NT/2000/XP barrier and will run "virtually any Windows 2000 or Windows XP application as intended, without the need to patch the host operating system (e.g. no need to patch the Linux kernel)." Accompanying this announcement was a change in corporate structure that I don't completely understand, but that wouldn't be the first time for that, of course. Anyway, NeTraverse, who produced Win4Lin up to now, "had its assets purchased by Win4Lin." Top management is the same, so it sounds like it's just a name change, but it's an odd way of describing it. I'm very much looking forward to trying this product out, and will let y'all know how it goes. 5:06:57 PM    comment []