Re: overcoming proprietary software for work

* On 2010 18 Feb 23:05 -0600, 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!

Hi Don.

Along the same lines of virtual machines, Virtual Box seems like a good
product for running another OS on a Linux workstation.  Debian even
packages it as Virtual Box OSE (Open Source Edition) which lacks direct
support for USB devices, but that doesn't seem to be as much of a
limitation as one may think.  There are other versions of VB available
at the website http://www.virtualbox.org/  Thus far I've not managed to
let the smoke out of anything with Virtual Box.  It's a nice, easy to
use program that gives the guest OS access to the network, printer,
drives, and other hardware of the host machine.

There is also a commercial Virtual Box product, as I understand it,
see:

http://www.sun.com/software/products/virtualbox/

If you can, you may want to try and run your pricing programs on aother
machine with Wine as an experiment before doing so on your production
machine.  My interest tends toward Amateur Radio software and I've had
some luck getting a few programs I'm interested in working with Wine. 
Wine seems to be developing at a rapid pace (still) so I keep up with
their latest Beta releases.  Wine does take some effort to setup so
that fonts and Windows widgets look satisfactory, at least to me.

There is also the commercial Wine product called Crossover that may
offer more support and capability: http://www.codeweavers.com/

Of the choices, running a Windows instance in a virtual machine is
probably best for program compatibility and ease of setup.  You do need
a license for Windows to be legal about it, which in business you most
assuredly want to do.

- Nate >>

-- 

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

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