what is the limitation wine

[Wayne Leutwyler]

On Monday 04 October 2004 11:01 am, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 10:01, Pasha wrote:
> > Rajiv wrote:
> > > Dear All,
> > >     What is the limitation of wine. Can I use wine for applications
> > > like smartdraw,Microsoft word,etc. Is there any alternative to wine?
> >
> > You probably won't be able to run MS Office applications with wine
> > only.  You may have more success if you set it up to use existing
> > windows partition data. The better way is to use commercial applications
> > based on wine - Crossover Office (www.codeweavers.com) and cedega
> > (www.transgaming.com). Crossover Office gives support for MS Office and
> > many other windows applications, cedega has DirectX implementation and
> > used to run games.
> > Alternatives to wine would be VMware and Win4Lin. They allow you to run
> > a windows OS (Win4Lin allows only Win95/98) on a hardware emulation.
>
> I tried crossover office and while it technically worked it was not
> really acceptable.  In my case I was trying to get it to work with
> Quickbooks which is really only partially supported.  I found it to be
> painfully slow and it had problems with some of the features of
> quickbooks.  I was able to access the basic data but if you do anything
> very fancy with the tools available it may or may not work as expected.
>
> As a result of that test that company will most likely move over to
> SQL-ledger which is a native accounting package under Linux using
> postgesql as the database back end.
>
> I have found that trying to keep one foot in Windows and the other in
> Linux for most things is counter productive.  I converted my laptop to
> linux many months ago and have not run windows on it since.  I did not
> have any issues with dual booting things as I did not need to do that.
> Finding native tools under linux for most things is fairly easy
> anymore.  I tried crossover office for quickbooks since it is very
> difficult to do a cut over for such an application.  But after that
> experiment I believe the correct approach is going to be to setup a
> second system with the new package under linux and run it in parallel
> for several months to make sure everything works as expected and to get
> everyone trained on the new software.  Once that is done the windows
> system will be shutdown forever.  This won't start until the current
> years financial records are closed out.
>
> For most other applications there are very good and in most cases better
> native alternatives under Linux, sometimes several to choose from.  Most
> people, IMHO, should just make the switch.  Prior to making the switch
> they need to list all the of applications and functions they use the
> computer for and research what is available under Linux.  Then the
> transition should be pretty smooth.  Setting up a dual booting system
> just adds another layer of complexity over the whole process.  One that
> I believe is not worth the effort.
>
>
>
> --
> Scot L. Harris
> webid at cfl.rr.com
>
> O.K., fine.

I have to agree with Scot. Just last week I was using my Linux system to play 
games on. I am using Cedega (aka WineX) and things had been running just 
fine, but on Friday afternoon I was playing one of the windows games and the 
game froze and the hard disk started to grind in a bad way. System was hard 
locked, had to hit the reset key. Once the box came back up I was unable to 
boot becuase of data corruption on the drive. This is the second time I have 
had this happen to me, both times WineX and a different game. So my leason 
learned here is this. If the app is not written for Linux then I am not going 
to be running it in Linux with Wine. I am going to convert my PC back to a 
Windose box and make it a gaming system. I have my laptop for Linux. 

But on a more postive note, I run just plain Wine on my office PC so I can use 
Lotus Notes and it works like a charm.

-Wayne