MindlessCode.net

Recently I’ve been wanting to do away with having to boot into Windows to print delivery confirmation labels for seed orders. We use the USPS Shipping Assistant which seems to work pretty well, but won’t install under Wine.

This is because of the very stupid way they package the program: To install you download an EXE which downloads an MSI installer, which the setup program then runs. This is fine, except that setup won’t download the installer Wine. If you download and install the MSI manually, you get a message that says “You can only install this software through the setup.exe program”. Even after using Orca to attempt to edit the MSI file all I had was a corrupt MSI file.)

True, I probably could have copied the files over manually and then mucked around in the registry, but I didn’t do it. I also wanted to be able to run Delphi “on Linux” so that I could fix bugs in QuickI (the invoicing program we use)–and believe me, it has bugs. Apparently you can run Delphi 6/7 through Wine, but it doesn’t work too well (e.g., debug features don’t work, when you hit compile and run, the program compiles but doesn’t run, and other random stuff like this.).

This didn’t really appeal to me, so I tried the trial version of Win4Lin Pro. This program allows you to run Windows NT, 2000, and XP Service Packs 1 and 2 on Linux. This version doesn’t require you to patch your kernel, so I thought I would try it and see how it worked. I downloaded the RPM and used rpm2tgz to convert the RPM to a Slackware TGZ package. It installed fine and I ran the setup program. After taking about 2.5 hours to install, I booted up Windows 2000 on my Slackware 10.1 computer. It was terribly slow–unusable, in fact. Apparently you can use KQEMU to make it faster, but I didn’t bother.

I removed Win4Lin Pro and decided to try Win4Lin 9x. The core of this version is an implementation of DOS which any DOS based version of Windows (Windows 3.x, 95, 98 and ME) can run on top of. It also requires that you apply some patches to your kernel, which I did. After that, the install was very easy and took only about 45 minutes to go from nothing to an running Firefox installation on Windows 98 (minus the time it took to compile my kernel 3 times :)). All I can really say is that Win4Lin really rocked–I bought it the next day. Currently I have Delphi 6 and the USPS Shipping Assistant installed. I hacked on QuickI last night, and found it a pretty easy environment to work under.

There are two different version of Win4Lin 9x–Home and and 9x. The “Home” version limits memory consumption to 64MB (instead of the 128 which is the max) along with a few other limitations (see here). If you’re a cheapskate, then check it out (only $30.00 compared to $90.00 for 9x). I can’t vouch for the Home edition as I didn’t try it, but I’m sure that it would probably work pretty well given the fact that a top-of-the-line computer had 128MB in 1998.

Sooo…if you are tired of using Wine (or CrossOver, which also rocks–and which I have bought as well), then try Win4Lin–it’s cool!

Also, you may enjoy the Ten Top Words that are Not in the Dictionary–I did.

Quote of the day:

“That young girl [Trillian]”, he [Marvin] added unexpectedly, “is one of the least benightedly unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.”

Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.