Alternative ways to run Windows apps (other than WINE)

[Havin_it]

Hi y'all,

I have some old-but-useful apps (Macromedia Studio MX) that are ceasing to play ball with WINE for whatever reason. Perhaps I could try to debug the issue to get them working, but that would probably be a very long slog for little reward, and quite possibly need doing again, and again, in future (this isn't the first time!).

So, that being the case, it looks like virtualization or emulation of the whole OS will be necessary. (Any other suggestions welcome though!)

I've practically no experience with virty, I know there are a number of options out there so I'd welcome opinions on which would be best for this use-case. The guest OSes that I could use for this are, I think, Win98, WinME (stop laughing) or WinXP Home Ed x86, and the host machine is a full-EFI AMD64 Gentoo system with multilib. Details of the APU are here if they mean anything much.

I realise this is quite a weak system, so is virty even viable? Am I best to go for the lowest MS OS I can use (e.g. Win98) to minimise resource requirement, or will that not make a difference?

Failing that, what about emulation e.g. DosBox, qemu, others?

Hope someone can guide me here. I still find some of these apps indispensable for some of my work, and would hate to lose them (and they cost a lot!)

[Ant P.]

ReactOS in a VM? Probably won't be any better than WINE, but it's another option.

You won't have many speed issues with VMs since you're running an AMD system with KVM hardware, but qemu can't run the Win98 installer to completion either way, last time I checked...

[Havin_it]

Hi Ant, thanks for the reply.

I agree on ReactOS, I hear about it every so often and it seems to be getting on well but I could see it having the same compatibility issues as WINE.

So what would you recommend for VM? Will they all run a 32bit guest OS on my 64bit system?

[Anon-E-moose]

qemu will run w98 but you must not use kvm (hardware acceleration) ie don't use "-enable-kvm" cmd line option.

Also you will need drivers for sb16 (if you enable sound and use that option)
I suggest cirrus for vga
and I doubt that you will get networking working without some trouble.

It runs pretty much like it was on an old 386 machine.

Edit to add: The last postings from when kvm was separate says react os works so it still might.
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PRIME x570-pro, 3700x, 6.1 zen kernel
gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland

[Havin_it]

So if I use XP, it'll run like a 286, or a TRS80?

I'm getting to think that XP is probably the sensible choice, being contemporary to Studio MX.

Having a go with VirtualBox now, but just realised I can't use my copy of XP because it's an OEM "Recovery" CD (never used before, thought it was a full-install I bought) so it verifies the hardware when booting from it. Guess that means I'll have to shell out for a retail copy

[Anon-E-moose]

I was speaking of win98, when I mentioned 386 speed, it doesn't work with kvm turned on.

XP and up will run with kvm turned on. It runs pretty quick on my vm.
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PRIME x570-pro, 3700x, 6.1 zen kernel
gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland

[Havin_it]

OK, I pulled a late one and ended up with XP installed in VirtualBox. Needed apps installed fine and running very acceptably

I'm really impressed with the performance. I think my perception of virty has been unfairly coloured by the pain of running OS X in PearPC on a budget Celeron laptop about ten years ago (and yes, before you say it, not a fair comparison even then, I know.)

Your replies have looked at kvm and qemu, so before I sign off I'm curious: do you have particular reasons for favouring this over VirtualBox? (apart from the whole Oracle thing I guess )

Also I see there are quite a lot of frontend options for kvm besides qemu, are there any others that you like, particularly with a desktop-app focus?

[Anon-E-moose]

Nothing wrong with virtualbox, I had run it quite a while back, when it was a sun product.

kvm as a separate project merged into qemu (proper I suppose as I believe it was just a fork project in the first place)
I guess I prefer qemu over the others as it's kernel level drivers come as part of the kernel.
Not that I need it but qemu will emulate quite a few processors other than intel/amd so it's there if needed.

Each virtual package has it's pluses. Whatever works well for you is what you should choose.
_________________
PRIME x570-pro, 3700x, 6.1 zen kernel
gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland