[ltp] Wine and Windows XP

Paul Kaplan linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Tue, 13 Sep 2005 20:45:49 -0400


On Tuesday 13 September 2005 08:31 pm, Richard Neill wrote:
> Hector Socas Navarro wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> >     I'm trying to make wine run some of my windows applications, such as
> > powerpoint or stellarium. I've heard so many good comments about wine
> > that I suspect it must be able to run at least the most common
> > applications.
>
> I've found wine to be a bit of a black art. Sometimes, older versions
> work better than the latest release. (Not always, though). Also, the
> official packages often work better than the distro-versions. Sometimes,
> you are best off to compile by yourself. That said, it does usually work
> - after some fiddling.
>
> Older Windows apps are often more stable than newer ones.
>
> The crossover-office version is non-free, but you can try a demo version
> - and this is guaranteed to run powerpoint.
>
> Alternatives:
>
> * Stellarium exists natively for Linux
>
> * MS make a free Powerpoint *viewer* which may be easier to install.
>
> * Copy your windows partition, and boot it under linux with Qemu/KQemu.
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard
I use crossover-office.  It's basically a wine front end that makes it easy to 
run windows installer programs.  CX is essentially a win98 emulator in that 
it creates a fake win98 installation under which all the win apps get 
installed.

I've heard that newer versions of wine will let you run windows apps that are 
already installed on ntfs partitions so NT/2K/XP, but I haven't tried it.  
Several years ago I used this method to launch apps installed on a win98 
partition.   The command was "wine <path_to_executable>".

The advantage to this method is not having to create a duplicate windows 
directory on your machine on the linux side.  The downside is it won't work 
on box that doesn't have a windows partition.  It's certainly easy to test.
Paul