A glowing review of Win4Lin 5.0 from ‘Open for Business’.
Gotta say, I use Win4Lin regularly, and it’s totally flawless. I had a bit of difficulty getting it installed — the installer didn’t like my kernel for some reason, if I recall correctly, and I had to go grepping through the install script (!). But it’s fantastic once it’s running.
The really impressive thing is when it boots Windows (in a window on your Linux desktop) much faster than Windows boots natively on the same hardware ;) Still haven’t figured out how it does that.
It does a nice job of a virtual network interface too; easier to admin than VMWare’s fake-net-with-DHCP thing. It just insmods a new network module, with a new ethernet address, and that responds to arp requests alongside your ‘real’ Linux interface’s address. Then all the control of IP address, network etc. is under Windows control.
I haven’t found an app that doesn’t work with it yet. (Mind you I hear Direct/X isn’t supported yet fully, so most games are probably out.)
I’ve even used it to watch Quicktime movies — which is pretty impressive when you consider that they’re displaying to a (Win4Lin) framebuffer, which is then displayed to another (VNC) framebuffer, which then displays to the hardware.
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