Linux WINE emulator question

[rvf500]

Having seen all the press on the various forums regarding Linux I am seriously thinking of making the jump. However I don't want to lose the large amount of windows based data that I have i.e. Word and excell files. I've done some searching and have read some stuff on the WINE emulator.

My questions are,

How well does this emulator perform, what are the drawbacks (if any). Is there anyone actually using this if so can I get some feedback. Is there another option?

I have used *nix emulators on a Win NT OS and that worked fine. However that doesn't mean that the opposite is true. *nix is an open system designed for portability. M$ is an organisation designed to port $$$$ from your pocket to their accounts

[problemchild]

IMO, wine is a really nice application, but it's too much of a crap shoot for my taste. You've got about a 50/50 chance of any given application running, and if it runs you have a 50/50 chance that it will work properly. You may get better or worse results depending on how much tweaking you put into it. If you have time to spend working with it, that may be good enough for you.

If you need to run Windows apps reliably, I recommend Win4Lin from Netraverse. It costs a little bit, but IMO you can't beat it for the combination of speed, reliability, and price. (VMWare is much more expensive and very slow.)

www.netraverse.com

[rvf500]

Thanks, I'll look up Win4Lin and go from there. I want something pretty reliable so 'crapshoot' doesn't exactly fill me with confidence lol

[sweet_angel]

yupe problemchild is right...I've been using vmware for about 2 weeks and I dumped them..cause slower than win4lin..even with vmware you can install any "guest OS including*nix)", but I think win4lin is better ( you can install any windows except XP).

[Xylinx]

OpenOffice is a good canidate for an Office application suite for Linux (i.e. Word and Excel) in which I would rather use than WINE or even a VM instance because it takes longer to load or resume from than just using OpenOffice (Star Office). Give Open Office a try and see if its worth using for yourself (you might be suprised)

Win4Lin and VMware run better on Linux than Windows as a host OS. Win4Lin is faster than VMware but VMware supports XP

Hope this helps

[rvf500]

Cheers ppl *scribbling notes down ferociously* Ok I have some good feedback to getting on with.

I'm Using XP at the moment but that would go anyway and I'd use Linux as my OS. Excell and word are my main concerns cuz that's where most of my documents live.

You may find some more dumb questions coming from my direction. Networks is my thing....all the clunky boxes that live below the transport layer. That and network management (I get about)

[cwk9]

OpenOffice can even read and save word and excel documents. Defintly an invaulable tool for anyone looking to make the switch from windows to linux.