Chapter 7: Application and Desktop Compatibility

Overview

Most people have Windows 2000 or Windows XP as their primary desktop operating system, but we have a handful of friends who have Linux as the primary operating system on their laptops.

The Windows folks we know need to get the occasional Linux application to peacefully coexist with Windows and, more frequently, the Linux folks need to get Windows applications running on Linux. So the idea of getting Linux applications to run on Windows and Windows applications to run on Linux is becoming an increasingly hot topic.

With that in mind, how can we do that?

There are a handful of ways we can approach this problem. We could

• Use software meant to work the same way on Windows as it does on Linux (and vice versa). That is, the software was written to look, act, and feel the same way regardless of what operating system it's running on. The Firefox web browser and the OpenOffice suite are good examples of this.

• Create a virtual machine environment and basically pretend to have a whole other machine inside our real machine. We can run Linux on our Windows machines (and run the applications we need inside) or Windows on our Linux machines (and run the applications we need inside).

• Run a program that enables Windows to run applications meant for Linux, or vice versa. This differs from the virtual machine approach in that the application can "see" the normal file system of the host operating system and interoperates a bit more naturally with other applications.

We'll explore some other desktop and application issues along the way. Specifically, we'll discuss how Windows users can have a very decent Linux-like environment. We'll also discuss some of the more popular methods for handling Office productivity.