My quest to stop dual-booting

I'm sure it's primitive compared to your Hallmark program, but I've used Openoffice.org greeting card templates to pretty good effect. They open in Draw and you can edit them (also some cd labels and other things here):

http://ooextras.sourceforge.net/downloads/english/index.php?tab=Draw

If it helps...

Hallmark's business practices are about as anti-competitive and non-open as you can get. Their ability to churn out imitations of successful indie card designers and swamp greeting card stores with their knockoff products is unparalleled.

I've had a Hallmark boycott in place since the 80's.

Oh, and I ditched my final Windows partition late last year!

Perhaps have the emulator run on a copy of your existing Windows install? (Maybe after some resizing?) Or even better, emulate from the partition directly?

I don't know if VirtualBox can do that or if any can, but it should be plausible, particularly the first choice. Glancing through QEMU's documentation, it seems like it can do it. And QEMU has the kernel accelerator module that's been recently open sourced.

Perhaps have the emulator run on a copy of your existing Windows install? (Maybe after some resizing?) Or even better, emulate from the partition directly?

I don't know if VirtualBox can do that or if any can (never played with virtualization), but it should be plausible, particularly the first choice. Glancing through QEMU's documentation, it seems like it can. And QEMU has the kernel accelerator module that's been recently open sourced.

Seriously - next time you need to knock out a card (especially for an aniversarry !!!!) - get off the computer entirely, and make something with your own bare hands and ingenuity, and write something original inside it that comes from your own heart.

Not only will that mean much much much more to the person you are giving it too, but it also gets you past your dual-boot problem !!

Easy

Hi

Do not give up on trying an install because the wine database says no - wine is constantly changing. In case of problems run installer & then the app from the command line to pick up error messages. Your solution may be as simple as moving a dll file in your .wine directory.

Have you got an old copy of win98 somewhere or can you lay your hands on one & does your card program need to be run on XP? 98 runs really well under qemu, is lighter on system requirements & can run many apps.

best wishes

Guy

how timely...

yesterday after my wife's laptop stopped working for a day (only to have it unexpectedly make a comeback last night for no reason) she was ready to give up windows, as every other computer in the house runs linux, except for one budget/finance application. all her other applications are already cross-platform open-source (firefox, thunderbird, openoffice).

i won't touch vmware; no closed-source in my linux kernel (but i'm a little less militant in userland with flash and java). virtualbox's integration on debian is too immature from what i've seen (non-debian-official closed-source deb & open-source version only in svn according to here). i don't have the hardware (VT or AMD-V) for windows on xen and even if i did i don't want the administrative overhead & infrastructure of xen. i want something reasonably simple, self-contained, and approachable by a newbie (maybe requiring one-time set-up by an admin, that's me).

i had experimented with qemu three or so years ago (where it took four hours to install windows 98), and had heard that kqemu, the kernel-side cpu-instruction execution-agent for qemu, had recently been open-sourced.

there's a debian package, kqemu-source, in unstable. it should work for ubuntu as all you need is kernel headers and the tools to build debs (which should be dependencies of the package). i built the resulting kqemu-module package on testing/"etch" and it compiled and installed fine.

i set-up and launched qemu as described in the quick start and had windows 98 installed in 30 minutes. (very different experience than previously.) good thing about windows 98: under 300 MB for a minimal installation. bad thing: 100% cpu utilization for the entire duration of its use (which heats my cpu like cpuburn, though you can find a few programs that issue the cpu HALT command when idle, but then windows 98 stutters and the user experience becomes choppy).

so i also tried windows 2000 and settled on it. the minimum install is ~750 MB, but it runs very smoothly with no cpu utilization when idle (after it settles down after booting, just as with a non-virtual desktop) and great performance the rest of the time (for a user-input-limited application). user experience and cpu utilization is more important to me than a GB of disk space.

the command to start it is simply: "qemu -localtime -hda hd.img -fda fd.img" (as the floppy image will be used for storing the compressed data files for easy backup apart from the windows installation). that's simplicity. i may add network capability, which will require some administrative work on my part, but we don't download QIFs over the internet, so it's not really necessary. i need to figure out how to print from within qemu, but we hardly need hard copies, so that's not a priority, and we can always print to a postscript file in windows and print it from linux.

so, after my recent experience (yesterday), may i suggest qemu with kqemu on debian/ubuntu.

I can also suggest qemu/kqemu + Win98 or Win2000. Coincidently, I run Win98 on Ubuntu just for an old greeting card program called PrintMasterGold. Win98 can only use qemu without the kqemu accelerator so it is a bit slow/choppy but the install was easy (from Synaptic or 'apt-get install qemu') and the Win98 disk image was only 200MB. With PrintMaster installed the diskimage is 400MB. For better performance install Win2000 or WinXP on qemu which can can take advantage of the kqemu accelerator.