what is the limitation wine

[Scot L. Harris]

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.