Linux OS Question?

Question

I am thinking about installing Solaris 10 and I have a question, are windows programs easy to install on it say, "Windows Live Messenger" "Yahoo Messenger" "AIM" "NO5 Chat Program" "Winamp" Ect? Thanks

Any alternative free Operating Systems out there that's got high reviews that does run windows programs?

Answer 1

You can use a program called WINE to run Windows programs on a Linux distro, but you may want to consider dual-booting with Windows and Linux/Solaris 10 (or triple boot with all three).

You can also use an emulator called VMware to run the Windows OS inside of Linux or Solaris 10.

Answer 2

Solaris 10 is actually a flavour of Unix not Linux. But those are similar. You should know that both Unix and Linux are very different than Windows and none of those programs will run on it. There are open source applications that can use the Messenger and AIM chat networks and will run under Linux (not sure about Solaris) but generally speaking everything you do in Solaris 10 is going to be way more difficult than it would be in Windows. You might want to look at a more user friendly OS like Unbutu Linux if you want to use it as a desktop machine. We use Solaris 10 to run enterprise level servers where you would never want an instant messenger type app running because of the security risks so I don't imagine many people have bothered developing for it.

Answer 3

Windows applications won't run natively on any OS other than Windows. Sometimes you can get an equivalent program or a version written for the different OS, but nothing but Windows will run Windows apps natively.

What you can do is install Windows within your OS on a virtual machine. Under OS X that would be either Parallels or Boot Camp. Under Linux you can use Wine or WMWare. You have to have a copy of Windows to install within the virtual machine, and it can be slow, but that allows you to run Windows within your other OS and Windows apps within Windows. There's an article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine that explains the concepts involved.

Answer 4

Solaris isn't Linux, it's a different Unix variant.

Windows programs don't run on Solaris, though there are usually alternatives. GAIM should cover the first 3, xmms can probably replace Winamp, and there are lots of different IRC progras.