[ale] A free alternative to VMWare and Win4Lin

[John Wells]

Geoffrey <esoteric at 3times25.net> said:

> Courtney Thomas wrote:
>> Thank you for the clarification.
>>
>> I fail to recognize the merit of this idea of increasing complexity. 
>> Isn't Winders unstable enough without bringing down both ?
>>
>> Why not use a KVM switch and put both, but separate, on a local LAN ?
>
> I don't know how win4lin does it, but if it's like vmware, it creates
> one huge file that contains the whole install.  You can back that file
> up and when the windows destroys itself, which they eventually do, you
> just replace the file with the backup and restart.

Win4Lin creates a "~/win" directory.  It uses the Linux filesystem as the
Windows filesystem, so I can create a file in ~/win and it automagially 
appears
in Win4lin under c:\.  Makes it very easy to share file between Windows and
Linux.

So, no single file, but I regularly back up the entire ~/win directory. 
  I also
have different versions of the directory for different purposes (test bed,
normal windows apps use, etc) and just change a ~/win symlink to point to the
one I'm after.

For what it's worth, Win4Lin is a fantastic product and I've found it to be
faster and much more resource efficient than VMWare.  I'm glad they finally
have Win4Lin Pro with 2000 and XP support...

It should be noted, though, that Win4Lin only does Windows...you can't install
other 'nixes, etc, like you can with VMWare.

John