Win4Lin Pro

By: Philip McCartney
Reviewed: December 23, 2005
Description: x86 installer for RPM based systems
Version: 6.2.5-01
Released: December 19, 2005
Website: www.win4lin.com

Win4Lin Pro is the latest edition to the Win4Lin line of products. The installer is available for download as either a .deb file for most Debian-based distributions or as a .rpm file for RPM-based systems. Win4Lin Pro is suppose to provide Linux users a way to run programs and applications that are designed for Windows 2000 and XP. If you want to run Windows 9x applications, then you're better off choosing Win4Lin 9x or Win4Lin Home.

To give you a little background, Win4Lin 9x is an excellent product. I use to have it loaded on a laptop that I would take with me out of town. I had Linux installed on the laptop, but I also had various Windows apps that I normally ran at home and worked with while on the road. My setup did what I needed it to do, but I was still needing something that would run Windows 2000 and XP apps. Sure, I could have very easily went with the competition and used VMware Workstation, but I was already satisfied with Win4Lin 9x. Therefore, I was holding out for this latest product, Win4Lin Pro.

Win4Lin Pro is still very much in its infancy, and there are a lot of things that the developers need to be worked on in order to get the performance output you would expect. For starters, there are a lot of people who have already tried Win4Lin Pro, and most of them who are also familiar with Win4Lin 9x feel disappointed with this Pro version. The problems that most people are faced with are installation and performance.

I admit, I too felt disappointment with this product. However, I have also taken into consideration how young this version is. The one thing I believe Win4Lin should have done instead of releasing it as a stable version is, they should have left this as either a Beta or maybe even an Alpha release.

Here's why; the installation can be, and often is very cumbersome. It's not for the novice or those who are impatient. To begin, the installation consists of three-stages. Stage one requires installing the Win4Lin Pro base-application as root. But, before you can install it on your Linux box, you have to make sure kernel-source and gcc are installed first. Once they are installed, it's best to reboot your system before attempting the installation, otherwise you're likely to receive error messages, causing even more frustration. The second stage also requires you to be logged in as root. You type in loadwinproCD at the command prompt, which starts copying your Windows CD to your hard drive /var/win4linpro/. Once the second stage is completed, it's best to remove the Windows CD before going onto stage three, otherwise, Win4Lin Pro complains and tells you to remove it anyway. Stage three is the Guest-session installation. This requires that you be logged in as a user instead of root. Next, enter the command installwinpro at the command prompt, and the Win4Lin Pro application will start the Windows installation.

Now that I've given you the quick run-through of how things are suppose to work, I think it's only fair to let you know how my installation went. My original objective was to install Windows XP. Unfortunately, after many attempts, I continued to get:

.......loadcd: failed to read: Input/output error

There's suppose to be a work-around, where you can create an ISO image of your Windows CD, and then copy the ISO to your hard drive. After doing all that, you then have to enter some additional commands... after reading many of the complaints in the forums that other people were having with XP, I just decided to use my Windows 2000 CD instead.

I have a Windows 2000 OEM w/SP3. Once again, I was at the stage-two portion of the installation process. This time, I received yet another error message:

loadwinproCD: Windows 2000 SP3 is not supported

Ohhhhh how the frustration seemed to continue. This time I went back to the user forums, and I was able to find a solution. This also required a lot of extra work on my behalf that I was not expecting. It's funny how Windows 2000 w/SP3 is not supported, yet Windows 2000 w/SP4 is. So, how was I going to come up with a Windows 2000 CD that had SP4 on it? The answer was a donationware utility called nLite. This program is a tool to help make a customized, pre-installation Windows setup. The latest version of nLite (as of this article) is v1.0 RC4. Everything was looking good until I found out that I needed to update my .NET Framework on my Windows box from v1.1 to v2.0 in order for this latest version of nLite to work properly. This required me to uninstall all of v1.1 first, before I could upgrade to v2.0, which took an incredible amount of time. Finally, once I had v1.1 uninstalled and v2.0 installed, I was now ready to make my customized Windows 2000 CD. I downloaded SP4 from Microsoft, and then I ran nLite. It was fairly easy to use. There are a lot of features that nLite offers, but all I wanted at this point was to have a bootable Win2k CD w/SP4 so I could at least test out Win4Lin Pro. After going through all the steps in nLite that were required, it eventually created an ISO image for me. I then burned the ISO to CD, and now I was ready to begin the installation that I was hoping for in the first place. It really was quite an ordeal just to get to this point.

After completing the stage-two portion, I logged out of root and logged into my user account on my Linux box. I opened up a terminal and followed the stage-three installation process, which in turn, started the Windows 2000 setup. On a stand-alone PC that is strictly going to run Windows 2000, the setup time is generally around 45 minutes. My setup time for Windows 2000 on Win4Lin Pro was nearly double that.

Once it was all said and done, I was finally ready to try my new installation out. Fortunately, it worked. However, it runs sluggish, and the mouse is somewhat slow to respond. Third-party applications are also very slow, especially when they require a lot of resources.

What it all boils down to is this; in my opinion, Win4Lin Pro still is not ready for mainstream distribution. As I mentioned earlier, the installation process is not for the squeamish, and the performance quality is bad. If you want to run Windows applications on your Linux box, and you can run them on Windows 9x, then you're better off using Win4Lin 9x. If you want to run Windows applications that require Windows 2000 or XP, then you're only option is going with the competition, VMware Workstation [Review].

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