Win4Lin Delivers Windows 2000 and Windows XP on Linux

[mike_c]

http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/9949

BOSTON--Feb. 16, 2005--Win4Lin, Inc., a leading supplier of virtual operating systems on Linux, today announced the release of their Win4Lin Pro(TM) product which runs Windows 2000 and Windows XP applications on Linux. Win4Lin Pro becomes the flagship of the company's Win4Lin product family, which also includes Win4Lin 9X(TM), Win4Lin Terminal Server(TM) and Win4Lin(TM) Home. Win4Lin, Inc. recently acquired the assets of NeTraverse, Inc., the original developers of Win4Lin products, and is ambitiously extending the product family.

"With Win4Lin Pro, Linux on the desktop has just become a reality. Previously, enterprises and users needing to migrate legacy Windows applications to Linux were stuck with either an expensive porting task or with clunky, non-integrated virtual machine solutions, or, in the case of Win4Lin, with running Windows 98. Now, with Win4Lin Pro's full support for Windows 2000 and XP, all of the barriers to adoption have been removed," said Jim Curtin, President and CEO of Win4Lin, Inc.

"For the last couple of years the objection we've heard most often was, 'you only run on Windows 98.' Today, that objection has been removed. You are now free to move to the Linux desktop while continuing to run your critical Windows 2000/XP applications."

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This is a big deal for me-- I've maintained Windows partitions on a couple of computers because I have a few critical apps that don't behave well under Crossover Office. The only drawback of the Win4Lin approach is that it requires a licensed copy of a supported Windows variant, but the payoff is that it runs all windows software natively. If you have Windows apps that you must use occasionally, this at least frees you from dual-boot hell. There are other solutions as well, but none as clean as simply running Windows as a Linux process, IMO.