PLUG homepage -> Articles --> Win4Lin Review Win4Lin Review By Jason Wallwork, April 2004 Update: This article originally referred to Win4Lin 5.1 which has been subsequently renamed Win4Lin 9x. It's still the same product. A newer product, Win4Lin Home is also the same except that only basic networking (i.e. Internet) is supported. Also, there is now available Win4Lin Pro, which is for running Windows 2000/XP. Win4Lin 9x gives Linux users the ability to run Windows 9x/Me and its software, a task it does very well. In this review, I tested Windows Me and the programs I like: mIRC, Firefox, Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Trillian, Acrobat Reader, Mailwasher Pro, Outlook Express, Web Express, Windows Media Player, Tweak UI and Irfanview. In fact, these were all programs I was previously using under Windows 98SE on my other partition. I removed the applications there and installed the applications under Win4Lin leaving the Windows partition only for games. We're getting ahead of ourselves, though. Let's take a look at the install first. First off, you need to have a full copy of Windows 95, 98, 98SE or Me and it has to be bootable (either by itself or with a floppy disk). OEM discs or restore discs, like those included with many desktop systems and laptops won't work. Win4Lin doesn't replace Windows; it allows the complete OS to work inside of Linux. Win4Lin is installed via a shell script which kicks up a graphical user interface. The guide to installing is concise but has to be followed exactly. If you make a mistake, though, support is just an email or a website away. I've found their email tech support helpful and knowledgeable and they maintain an excellent online knowledge base. Since it's email support, you can expect to wait 1-2 business days for a response. The hardest part of the install is that it's done in three stages and requires a reboot. In the first stage, Win4Lin checks your distribution and installs its own software and a compatible Win4Lin-patched kernel which then has to be booted to do the rest of the install. A handy part of this install is that the website is checked for any new updates. The second stage involves copying the cab files to the hard drive and the third stage, a personal installation of Windows. Installing the personal installation of Windows goes very fast since it's from the harddrive. The Win4Lin graphical installer is much like using a typical Windows installer telling you what it's doing and why it's doing it. My only criticism of the installer is that at 800x600, it takes up the entire screen (and a tiny bit more) so you have to hide the KDE taskbar in order to click the bottom buttons. Using Win4Lin is incredibly easy. An icon is created on your desktop to access it as well as a menu icon. I don't know if it's just with the distro I used (SuSE 9.0 Pro) but the menu icon was buried under Utilities -> More Programs in KDE. Starting up Win4Lin Desktop, as it's called, loads the entire Windows OS but does so much faster than it would if you were booting Windows by itself on a PC (about 30 seconds or less compared to two minutes on my machine, an old P3 Celeron-533 Mhz with 128 MB RAM). Once started, everything looks the same except that Windows is treated as a Linux X app. As with Windows alone, programs can (and will) crash. The neat thing is that you can use Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the task manager and shut down the offending application, something I don't remember being able to do in Win4Lin version 4. In the occasional case where Windows seems to completely freeze up or the screen won't refresh, you may have to shutdown Windows entirely and restart. You can either do this with Ctrl-Alt-Del or click the Linux window close icon to shut things down. Happily, restarting Windows is fast. I should note that it also possible to run Win4Lin in full-screen mode. Simply run it from a command-line with the command fwin. The Windows desktop appears in an alternate virtual terminal which fills up the screen and you can switch back and forth between Windows and Linux easily. Applications ran smoothly overall but performance was sluggish sometimes if Active Desktop was turned on. Normally, applications loaded and ran at almost native speed. Netraverse claims this performance is achieved because of the boost in using Windows uncompressed on a Linux filesystem and very little emulation is used. Windows programs simply talk to Windows except when accessing communication ports, video, sound, mouse, keyboard and networking. In those cases, the patched kernel translates those calls to the Linux equivalent. All the applications I used ran and ran well. However, video and sound still aren't perfectly in sync (sounds lags video) and video is still a little choppy, though reasonable. The only missing functionality using Windows with Win4Lin is advanced peripheral support. Win4Lin doesn't support USB devices beyond keyboards and mice or 3D card support. New to this version, DirectX is now supported to some extent. However, I haven't tried any games other than Hoyle's cards which may not even use DirectX. I imagine they've added this support since many media formats now use DirectX encoding. Networking is easy to setup and quick. You can choose the basic networking setup which only allows for Internet access through your Linux host or the advanced setup which supports the full Windows winsock meaning IRC, instant messaging, network neighbourhood and many other applications work as well. Without rebooting, you can't get much better than Win4Lin 9x for running Windows 9x and applications. Win4Lin 9x retails for $90 USD from Win4Lin.com. For a comparison of ways to run Windows applications under Linux, check out my online slideshow. ©1999-2006 Peterborough Linux User Group. Logos and buttons are used by permission of their respective owners. PLUG can not be held liable for damages resulting from the use or misuse of the information at this website or from its members. Comments about the site can be sent here.