Emulation vs Virtualization

[Duane Clark]

Doug Young wrote:

> Would someone please explain in simple english what the functional
> differences are between emulation & virtualization are as far as being able
> to run Windows applications under Unix / Linux in a "real world" (ie
> commercial office) environment ??
> 
> For what its worth I'd prefer to use an open source unix (FreeBSD / OpenBSD)
> rather than linux, however there are other issues (difficulty in getting
> StarOffice / CUPS / etc running reliably) that may force the use of
> something like Mandrake where at least StarOffice / CUPS do work properly.
> I've installed both bochs & codeweaver wine in Mandrake (neither of which
> are usable by other than hackers in FreeBSD/ OpenBSD) but haven't been able
> to get any Windows applications to install let alone run.
> 
> Does anyone have experience with FreeMware / VmWare / plex86 / etc  ??  and
> can recommend something that might do the job ??
> 
> 
> 

I use VMWare occasionally, and wine frequently. I much prefer wine.

VMWare is certainly much better at running virtually any Windoze app, 
and running it correctly. That is basically because you install a real 
copy of Windoze (or whatever operating system) into the VMWare virtual 
machine. The penalty is that VMWare is just plain SLOW, especially 
graphics and mouse performance. This is running on a 700MHz Athlon, too. 
I understand that the processor chips have "hardware support for virtual 
machines", whatever that means, but it is no where near as fast as the 
"real" machine.

Wine on the other hand, while there are bits and pieces that are a bit 
slow, in generally performs vastly better than VMWare. The main problem 
is of course that Wine is alpha software, and application compatibility 
is hit and miss, though lately the hit rate has been improving 
significantly. Many apps work perfectly (for me).

Installation in wine seems to often be more of a problem than actually 
running the application. I much prefer to boot Windoze to do the 
installation (often in VMWare), then back to Linux to run the program in 
Wine.

-- 
My real email is akamail.com at dclark (or something like that).