Those who know Win4Lin like me, have been waiting for it for a while ! Win4Lin allows to run the Windows OS under Linux inside a X window. The technology is different than let’s say vmware; it just works great and is amazingly fast. Win4Lin is a commercial product ( about 100US$ ) I used to have at work. Its main limitation is that, until now, it could only run win95/win98/winme. Since most people have switched to windows XP, it made little sense to spend 100US$ to buy such a product, since you also had to buy an old version windows license … if you could find a way to do it. This new release now supports windows XP and windows 2000. That is why I will consider buying it for office use. I previously described coLinux which allows to run the Linux OS inside a windows on a computer running the Windows XP operating system. Win4Lin is just the other way : it allows to run the Windows OS inside a windows on a computer running the Linux operating system. Both technologies have their own limitation. The main one is that it is hard/impossible to access directly the hardware, consequently this relies on the native OS to handle it. Networking is a good example : since the ethernet card cannot be directly accessed, these technologies provides a virtual driver for the network card. There might be some other limitations … thought I did not try by myself, I would not expect plug & play devices to work easily under Win4Lin. I remember that the Linux kernel had to be patched in order to run Win4Lin … an impressive list of kernel patches and pre-compiled binaries could be found on their web site. I am now wondering how many license I should buy if I want to have a dual boot : native Windows XP and Windows XP under Linux via Win4Lin. Because Win4Lin ask you to install Windows, it might also ask you to register it … and then you would need an aditionnal license ( assuming your computer have Windows natively installed ). I will check this out on their web site and hopefully find an answer. Frankly speaking, I am quite impatient to try this out … and based on my previous experience, I have pretty high expectations !
Feel free to read the Win4Lin Press Release.