Those who know Win4Lin like me, have been waiting for it for a while !
Win4Lin allows to run the Windows OS under Linux inside a X window. The technology is
different than let's say vmware; it just works great and is amazingly fast.
Win4Lin is a commercial product ( about 100US$ ) I used to have at work. Its main limitation is that, until now, it could only
run win95/win98/winme. Since most people have switched to windows XP, it made little sense to spend 100US$ to buy such a product,
since you also had to buy an old version windows license ... if you could find a way to do it.
This new release now supports windows XP and windows 2000. That is why I will consider buying it for office use.
I previously described coLinux which allows to run the Linux OS inside a windows on a computer running the Windows XP operating system. Win4Lin is just the other way : it allows to run the Windows OS inside a windows on a computer running
the Linux operating system.
Both technologies have their own limitation. The main one is that it is hard/impossible to access directly the hardware, consequently this relies on the native OS to handle it. Networking is a good example : since the ethernet card cannot be directly accessed, these technologies provides a virtual driver for the network card. There might be some other limitations ... thought I did not try by myself, I would not expect plug & play devices to work easily under Win4Lin.
I remember that the Linux kernel had to be patched in order to run Win4Lin ... an impressive list of kernel patches and pre-compiled binaries could be found on their web site. I am now wondering how many license I should buy if I want to have a dual boot : native Windows XP and Windows XP under Linux via Win4Lin.
Because Win4Lin ask you to install Windows, it might also ask you to register it ... and then you would need an aditionnal license ( assuming your computer have
Windows natively installed ). I will check this out on their web site and hopefully find an answer.
Frankly speaking, I am quite impatient to try this out ... and based on my previous experience, I have pretty high expectations !
Feel free to read the Win4Lin Press Release.