LinuxWorld.com – Shortly after I wrote about Win4Lin a few weeks ago, I was bombarded with questions from readers asking how it compares to VMware. Win4Lin is a product that allows you to install and run Windows 95 or Windows 98 under Linux.

Windows Emulators for Linux: VMware, Win4Lin Face Off. Ultimately, my wallet makes the decision for me. Win4Lin is $79.99 if you download it. Can recover any files like a magic as it said in its description, works on any file system of.

With VMware, you can also install and run various other versions of Windows under Linux. (See for links to both.) They may sound similar, but I don't believe a comparison between the two is appropriate, at least not as the products stand. Currently, Win4Lin has one specific purpose: it provides a fast, stable Windows environment under Linux so that you can run Windows productivity applications without having to sacrifice Linux as your default environment. In contrast, VMware is a general-purpose virtual machine that, among other things, runs Windows productivity applications under Linux. In other words, VMware goes way beyond the capabilities of Win4Lin. In addition to Windows 95 or Windows 98, you can run Windows 2000 in a virtual machine under the Linux host operating system.

VMware is also available for Windows; with that version, you can run Linux in a virtual machine under Windows. You can also run other operating systems, such as FreeBSD, in the virtual machine. And you can run multiple virtual machines simultaneously. How we tested Hardware Processor: Athlon 1 GHz Memory: 256 MB PC133 RAM Mass storage: Two Maxtor ATA 66 IDE drives (one 20 GB drive and one 40 GB drive) Platform Operating System: Storm 2000 (Debian 2.2) Kernel: 2.2.17 (custom) Configuration: Debian system has been upgraded to latest Woody unstable release. All partitions have been formatted as Reiserfs. Testing Methods Software: VMware 2.0.3, Win4Lin 2.0, Windows 98 SE, Microsoft Office 2000 Premium, Netscape Communicator 4.76, Internet Explorer 5.5, Microsoft Media Player Clearly, many of my readers are enamored with VMware due to the gee-whiz factor of being able to run one or more operating systems in isolated virtual machines on top of the host operating system.

Alpine Ski Racing Pc Game. I confess it's a pretty cool experience to boot up VMware in a Linux window and then jump into the virtual BIOS setup screen or watch it count up the virtual RAM. But once I get beyond the coolness factor, I don't see any compelling reason to use VMware in preference to Win4Lin, at least for the reasons most Linux business users would use Win4Lin. Lagu Project Ear South East A on this page. Reluctant comparison In the first place, Win4Lin is clearly much faster than VMware.

Granted, Windows under VMware is perfectly usable on my system, but Windows under Win4Lin not only runs faster than Windows under VMware, it seems to actually run faster than Windows alone. My readers tell me there's a good reason for that: it's the filesystem.

The default ext2 (second extended) filesystem for Linux is supposedly faster than the FAT16 or FAT32 filesystems that Windows 98 uses. I'm using Reiserfs, which performs even better than ext2, so perhaps I saw even a greater benefit.

This difference in the way files are handled may also be one reason why Windows runs faster under Win4Lin than on VMware. Win4Lin installs Windows as separate files on the Linux filesystem (as I said, in my case it's Reiserfs), so it fully benefits from that filesystem. VMware creates a virtual disk on the filesystem and installs everything on that virtual disk. I'm just guessing, but I suspect there is some extra overhead involved in accessing files on the virtual disk. VMware does give you another option, though.