[ale] VM ? (addendum: without windows licenses?)

Tue Feb 27 11:07:30 EST 2007

On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 07:25 -0500, Byron A Jeff wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 10:59:37PM -0500, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 18:44 -0500, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> > 
> > > hmm... my DELL didn't come with a CD, it's on that stupid rescue partition.
> > 
> > 
> > I hate that.  
> > 
> > However, by way of technical restrictions, I am not permitted to
> > actually use my license of Windows in any way that I want.  In essence,
> > Toshiba and Microsoft are telling me that I am not allowed to run this
> > copy of Windows in an emulated environment, implying that I have to buy
> > a new Windows XP license to do that.  
> 
> It's for this reason that I'm only interested in envinronments that doesn't
> require a copy of Windows to run.

Yes.  The hard part is knowing when Windows is actually required, and
only merely listed as a requirement because everyone else does.  For
example, when I signed up for school online, I figured that they wanted
Windows XP because it was recent and supported by Microsoft so that they
didn't have to field requests about people's systems.  It's like ComCast
saying, you have to have Windows.  Well, not really, they'll only
support Windows.  Well, it seems that there are still some things that
OpenOffice.org hasn't caught up with Microsoft Office with, and getting
the teachers to use OpenOffice.org is not an option.  *sigh*

I may very well have to just suck it up and make my system a dual-boot
system.  I don't want to do that, though.

> Does anyone have an accurate representation on the usefulness of Wine and/or
> Crossover? In the past I just haven't had enough patience to fiddle with
> either of them in order to see if they actually work with any degree of
> reasonableness. I generally spend my focus working with native Linux apps,
> which I feel is worth the time to fiddle.

I use Wine for a few things that don't need Windows explicitly.
Unfortunately, I haven't had MS Office 2000 or newer, though I know that
Office 97 runs just fine on it.  I also know that Word 2000 runs fine on
it.  I don't know about the rest of the Office 2000 suite, nor about the
ones newer than that.  Of course, I would like to have a legit copy of
Office 2000 or XP so that I can find out if they work, not to mention, I
need one or the other for my classes.  Arrgh.

> But the reality is that we live in a world where most folks believe that
> Windows is inexorably bound to their computers. So as with the OP who is 
> fine working with Linux, the SO is not. She needs that one or two Windows
> applications that she cannot live without.

Very true.  I have been working on some friends of mine for awhile now.
Some of them hold little regard for licenses because of their financial
situation, and of course, while I understand that, I am trying to get
them to understand that there is little room in the law for their use of
software the way that they seem to choose to do so.  Should someone even
suspect them of Copyright Infringement, the investigations would likely
reveal quite a bit to be worried about.  Of course, that is true in many
circles of society today; piracy is accepted over legitimacy because of
a perception that big companies are bad and aren't really missing
anything, anyway.

> I'm working with a couple of non profits who are in somewhat of the same
> situation. There's a couple of custom applications built in VB that one
> would like to run remotely from a central applications server. Costing out
> terminal server and CALs is a real headache. A Linux applications server
> for windows applications without Windows licenses would be a real benefit.

Is there any way to move those custom VB applications over to Mono or to
Python+GTK or Python+wxWidgets or something else that would be portable
and easy to maintain?  If so, it would be pretty trivial to set up a
server that the applications run on and are merely displayed on the
clients running them, of course.

In all probability, Wine will work for the applications that you're
talking about, though.  If they are distributable applications (e.g., if
this application has or can package them up in any way), you can try
them out on a Linux system running Wine to see what happens.  The
current version of Wine is 0.9.31.

> In short, I'd like to get the ability to run the occasional Windows app without
> having to have a Windows license. 
> 
> Anyone doing this?

At present, I use Wine for running:

     1. Microsoft Internet Explorer (which I've not used in the last
        three months; the last time I used it was to contact a web site
        that needed to unbreak their site so that I could use Firefox or
        Epiphany.)
     2. TurboTax 2005, which I had to run.
     3. TurboTax 2006, which I also had to run (you have to bump up the
        Windows version that Wine reports to make that work, though.)
     4. A Windows version of Firefox that can access a web site for
        school that requires the Shockwave player (wtf?!  why?!?)

It works pretty good for me, but I don't use it for that much.  If
anyone else has more that they use it for, they would likely be more
qualified to talk about it.  :-)

I hope that after I transfer into a brick-and-mortar institution, I will
not be needing to use Wine at all, frankly.  On the spectrum of things,
I lean more towards RMS than anybody else, though I am not "all the way
there."  :-)  I certainly have a very strong preference for my own
freedom, though, and I hate depending on non-free applications for
anything, particularly when the non-free applications that I interact
with daily (on the university's Windows network) are going down and
doing stupid things all the time that only prove their inferiority.

    -- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
                    fd0man at gmail.com
Phone: (404) 592-5746
                          Jabber IM:
                    fd0man at gmail.com
              fd0man at livejournal.com
Demand Freedom!  Use open and free protocols, standards, and software!
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