[Wine] Re: Planning first Linux/Wine install

[Darren Wilkinson]

anandpursahibwale at yahoo.com wrote:
> Another wrinkle in my planning:  I have a favorite personal financial
> management program (i.e, checkbook plus) that I've been using under
> OS/2's Win3.1 capability for the past 13 years.  Because it does the
> job I need, and it has 13 years of data, and did not export
> satisfactorily to Quicken 98, I would like to continue using it.  It is
> a straight Win 3.1 program and it would not install under Win98 or
> Win2K.
> 
> Can Wine run Win 3.1 programs without a DOS/win3.1 partition, and how
> would it install (especially given that it won't install under
> Win98/Win2K)?
> 
> Thanks for indulging me my attachments to legacy software!
> 
> anandpursahibwale at yahoo.com wrote:
>> I'm planning my first Linux/Wine install.  Is there any advantage to
>> having a Windows (say W2K) partition to install Win apps to, when the
>> plan is to run them under Wine/Linux?
>>
>> I do have a licensed copy of W2K, so I could do that if it were an
>> advantage (e.g., is it easier to install difficult or unruly win apps
>> under windows first?).
> 
Wine generally doesn't need windows installed but having it installed can be an 
advantage and if it is your first linux install I'd recommend keeping windows 
for now even if you plan to get rid of it later. Some apps, if available for 
both linux and windows, can use the same config files in both linux and windows. 
Another point worth mentioning is that although an app may add registry entries 
when installing most programs if they can't find the registry entries they need 
(i.e. first time when run after installing) create them and fill them with 
default values. This fact makes running most pre-installed apps with wine very easy.

One thing you could consider is using the qemu emulator (with kqemu). Although 
This is an emulator with kqemu installed it won't emulate the cpu but passes 
instruction straight to the host cpu. This means that most programs can run 
roughly as fast as on wine/windows but be on a virtual machine. You can have 
os/2 installed to an image file (a pretend hard disk that is actually a file) 
and have os/2 able to see other partitions on any 'real' hard disks and 
floppies. This rules out compatibility as a problem for os/2 or win 3.1 apps as 
strictly speaking you won't be using linux (but using os/2 *on top of* linux) to 
run them.

I've just noticed you've mentioned qemu in another post. Qemu is easy to 
understand but you may have to run it as root if you want to use kqemu. Qemu is 
in a few ways easier use than wine as it uses almost nothing of the host systems 
software. One major advantage of wine is memory usage. Qemu by default will 
cache at least 144MB for itself and will limit its virtual machine to 128MB of 
that whereas the most wine will take is whatever the app needs and will just 
grab more memory as necessary.