Re: overcoming proprietary software for work

Vidiir wrote:
> I am a newb and have some questions about running proprietary software
> inside Ubuntu or some other distribution.  I have wanted to switch for
> years but have three pricing programs that are written for Windows.
> My vendors refuse to even entertain questions about Linux.  I am
> illiterate about it and would love to visit with someone in person
> that may be able to offer some suggestions on how to achieve my goal.
> I understand there are emulators like Wine, but don’t want to start
> tinkering around and inadvertently let all the smoke out of my work
> machine!  Many thanks to anyone that can reply!
> 
> Don Murphy
> Wichita, Kansas
> 

I have no experience with Wine. I believe it works pretty well for some 
things, but maybe not so well with others. I have been using VMware 
quite a bit for some time and have been quite happy with it. In case you 
don't know, VMware is a virtual machine platform. You can install lots 
of different OSs on it, including pretty much any version of Windows. It 
runs quite well on a Linux platform.

There are several different VMware products. I have an older copy of 
VMware Workstation for linux, which works nicely. You have to pay for 
that product, but it isn't too bad. It is designed to run on a 
workstation and inside of it you can install as many OS instances as you 
like. They also have several server products and the basic VMware Server 
is actually free.

My current way of using it is to install VMware Server on a Linux 
server. I have then created a Windows XP virtual machine on that server. 
I then use remote desktop to connect to and log in to that XP machine 
and do whatever Windows thing I need to do. The advantage here is that I 
can access the same Windows install from any of several computers that I 
use regularly over the network. And there are remote desktop clients for 
  Linux and OSX and of course it is built into XP and newer. You do have 
to run XP or newer on the virtual machine as the earlier version didn't 
support remote desktop.

I will say that VMware can be a bit tricky to install on some Linux 
distributions because there are kernel modules that have to be compiled 
and installed and different kernel versions have various quirks.

Steve

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Steven Saner <[email protected]>