KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management [LWN.net]

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 14:32 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501)
In reply to: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management by bronson
Parent article: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Dammit, if I want to run an old copy of Armor Alley, why can't I just scp a single file from a friend and double click on it?

To be fair that's exactly how it works these days in wine. Perhaps you don't count wine as 'virtualisation', but from a user's POV it does the same thing: 'runs my Windows programs'. And these days it does it pretty well.

I've been doing a lot of building design recently and the world is _full_ of stupid little programs for Windows to spec beams and tanks and do heat analysis and the only easy-to-drive* no-cost 3D drawing package (Sketchup) has no Linux version. Everything I have tried so far works in wine, somewhat to my amazement (sketchup is cranky due to opengl/video hardware options, but it does work).

This virtualisation stuff doesn't help me at all because it needs a copy of the host OS and I simply don't have any of those.

* And yes I did try Blender first but after about 6 hours I had drawn 3 slightly wonky walls of the garage. In the same time in Sketchup I'd done pretty-much the whole design (house+extension). I love my free software as much as the next man but a) Blender not really technical drawing software - that's not it's heritage and b) Sketchup's interface is _really_ nice, at least for initial more-or-less right models -I'm not sure it's great detailed tech-drawing software either. Bit off-topic there, but I just wanted to point out that download+double-click does in fact now work for lots of Windows software thanks to the marvelous work of wine. I agree that having this work one way or another is an important part of weaning people off Windows. A lot of people have one or two things like this that keep them tied to Windows. And we need critical desktop mass to get drainpipe manufacturers to stop writing Windows-only apps.

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