Emulate Windows?

[tampabay420]

Is it possible to Emulate 'Windows' on linux/bsd ? (i'm sure it's possible /|\ is it available?)

I've seen it for MAC but not for others?

[prodikal]

isnt wine an emulator for linux that imitates windows i think it imitates versions from 95 to XP i dont think it emulates
NT though or are you talking about a GUI ?

[tampabay420]

1.Not just the GUI- i'd like to emulate the Operating System on my LinuxMachine.
2.Was "WINE" the name of the Emulator?
3.Will emulated windows have a problem storing data files? (ext2 vs. NTFS?)

[prodikal]

yes wine is the name but i have had some problems trying to run games i think apps and stuff should be fine to emulate to
the website is here

www.winehq.com/

[slarty]

Several options:

- Wine emulates the Windows API and hence allows you to run (some) Windows programs on Linux. The Windows programs don't know they're running on linux.

- VMWare, Plex86 and Bochs actually emulate x86 hardware, and hence you can run a "Real" copy of Windows on the emulated hardware. Much more accurate, but slower and requires a real windows licence.

Wine will not allow programs running on it to store their files on an NTFS partition (until there's a real writeable NTFS driver for Linux anyway) - however they *can* store their data on any other type of partition Linux supports (ext3, etc) without noticing the difference (actually they might "see" it as a FAT or FAT32 partition)

The hardware emulators will provide a "virtual disk" on which you can run whatever filesystem the version of Windows you use supports. To use native storage you may have to "Network" mount it via samba.

[problemchild]

The best option in my book is Win4Lin, available from www.netraverse.com. You can install and run your copy of Windows 95 or 98 (*not* Me or 2000/XP) just like if it was running on DOS. Much more reliable than wine, and faster and cheaper than VMWare.

Only drawback is that it doesn't support DirectX applications and games.