On Sunday, January 28, 2018 at 1:55:54 PM UTC-8, Sarah wrote:
Thanks all, I'm aware of Parallels & VMware. I asked about Wine for a reason - I'm cheap. My need for windows is sporadic (Once a season toying with LXStyler, maybe a spring refresher with LXSim). I don't want to buy a subscription based program, like Parallels, and the associated Windows OS. Do you need to buy a copy of WIndows for VMware? It wasn't obvious on their website.

Encouraged by my luck with LXSim, I tried LXStyler. It's close - as I said, I think I've just not got the right libraries. I read on the LXnav site Styler requires .NET 2.0 ... and as I recall there was a VB dependency as well.



On Sunday, January 28, 2018 at 3:23:53 PM UTC-6, Darryl Ramm wrote:
Parallels and VMware Fusion are *not* Wine in a commercial or any other real way.

Parallels and Fusion are virtual machine monitors, they let multiple operating systems run on the computer hardware. Wine is a Windows operating system emulator (regardless of if the name tries to say otherwise). Wine has the benefit of not needing a Windows operating system, at the disadvantage of lots more compatibility issues, and well for some things you really want Windows, warts and all.

Once you have VMWare or Parallels (and Darryl may not be quite as unbiased as he says...) there is a trick to running Windows without a license. Microsoft on their developer website maintains Virtual Machine disks for many different versions of Windows for VMWare and Parallels. You can download these for free, they work for 30 days and then time out. Their intended use is to test IE, but I have in the past used them for testing other things.