So I'm finally at the last straw with Windows. I hate it. I've always hated it but the wife was scared of change so I kept it going. But Window's insistence on "protecting" me by preventing me access to certain areas created hours of work for me last night when I was trying to recover from a recent malware problem. So I'm done with it. But my problem is that I have tons of third party applications, some of which are old so I don't have the original disks for. And others that have been customized to my liking over a long period of time and I don't know if I could even set it up again the way I like it if I had to. So my question is this: will I loose these programs and/or their settings (assuming said settings aren't configured in say Window's regedit) if I install LINUX?
Linux flavors often have a dual boot facility as part of the install, so that you can reboot into Linux or into Windows depending on what programs you want to run.
For example, ubuntu, offers to install grub right from the getgo. grub (another one is lilo) allows you to specify which OS you want to boot. This requires a free disk partition for Linux.
You can install VMware or other virtual system software packages. Also requires at least one separate disk partition for each OS. This allows both Linux and Windows to run at the "same" time.
If you only have Linux installed on your box you may not be able to run your Windows apps under wine - wine is the least among the choices here. wine provides a windows framework under linux. It seems to work for older apps, but anything that is a newer major windows app has caused me problems in the past. YMMV.
edit -
implicit assumption in the above - you left windows installed, and added another hard drive or partition. I don't know enough about wine to comment beyond some tinkering with it.
Hi Jim, thanks for the response. I'm actually hoping to remove Windows entirely. My ideal situation would be to get the new LINUX OS to see these 3rd party apps as they are now without having to reinstall them from scratch again. If by "windows apps" you mean things like windows media player then I won't miss things like that. I rarely use the MS provided softwares. Even WMP I've long since mothballed in favor of SMplayer instead.
It's going to reformat your drive during installation and it will not see your apps if you perform a new install. Linux won't "upgrade" from your current Windows install so I believe you'll have to find a Linux app that is comparable to what you are currently using. There are thousands out there and I've found a replacement for everything I was using before.
Good luck.
I'm surprised to tell this to a long time UNIX admin, but Linux is not windows and never will be. Windows programs are not, have never been, and will never be directly supported. Installing the WINE libraries lets you run some of them but this is often tricky.
You'll need to find new ways to do a lot of things. But that's pretty much the point. If it was the same as windows, did everything the same way as windows, ran the same programs the same way in the same interface, what would be the point? It'd have all the same problems too.
What are these 3rd party apps you need so badly? Are they really irreplaceable?
I'm not saying that it is. If I implied that than I apologize. I was just asking if I could retain my third party applications (ie: software made by Adobe, Mozilla, EA, Goldwave, etc) under the new operating system without reinstalling them from scratch. I do not generally see third party apps as "Windows programs".
You might be shocked to learn that 3rd party apps for Windows won't run under IRIX, either, then. Really, it's the same principle... Linux is as alien to Windows as HPUX, Solaris, OSX, or any other OS built around UNIX guidelines and not Microsoft ones.
Some of the ones you mention have Linux versions, like Mozilla. Others beg the question -- Adobe what? There's an Adobe Reader for linux(plus open alternatives like xpdf), and an Adobe Flash Player(plus open alternatives like Gnash), and I'm not sure what else. Some have open alternatives for a variety of OSes and architectures, like the audio editor/mixer Audacity. And some are just really reaching, assuming EA means EAgames... It's possible, I suppose, using WINE, but emulating Windows perfectly has been found to be an uphill battle. There's plenty of older games that run better in WINE than Windows XP, but when MS invents new API's and tosses old ones in the garbage bin every month, it's unlikely for the latest and greatest games to work.
If you want all your Windows applications running in a Windows interface, use Windows.
I guess this is the piece to the puzzle that I didn't know. Last time I played with LINUX was years ago, it was Gentoo, and I was helping a buddy at work try and make it cooperate with Lotus Notes. So I assumed that any app would work with LINUX if you used enough elbow grease.
Don't let that stop you. Do a little research on the available applications and you may be happy to switch. I run Ubuntu on my laptop exclusively, though it dual boots Vista for my wife, who hates change. I have OpenOffice and lots of other open source apps that I've installed that let me do everything I was doing before. Even a couple dozen games to keep me occupied. So it's a viable alternative. I can be up and running in about 30 seconds and shutdown and powered off in about 10 or 12. It's fast and it works. Give it a shot.
And I have to say here... so indulge me...
"Windows, we don't need no stinking Windows... "
Thanks. You and Jim both mention a dual boot setup. That's sounds like maybe a good place to start. Baby steps and all that. But you also mentioned that installing it will reformat my drive during installation. Is that true even if you configure it for dual boot?
I think Ubuntu is capable of shrinking an existing NTFS partition to make room for itself, assuming, of course, it's not already full. I haven't tried dual booting that way, myself, last time I "chickened out" and put Linux on a seperate drive in the same computer. Take appropriate precautions of course, back up your stuff first. The linux NTFS tools are quite good but making the installer do what you want, well, an installer that's too friendly can assume you want to reformat or something...
Well, yes and no. It's extremely hit and miss. And lots of things these days demand things well beyond basic Windows such as modern versions of IE and bits and pieces of .Net.
You also mentioned importing settings, not just using something. Copying settings from one computer to another can be a hellish enough job inside windows, let alone extracting it and converting it to something WINE can use.
I'm thinking I might chicken out too. I'm thinking I might try using Partition Magic. I have 65GB of free space on my main drive. I think the best way may be to partition 40GB for Ubuntu. Is that enough? I'm having a hard time finding out how much space it needs. Some people say 2.5GB and others say 20-25GB.
40GB should be a good amount of space. 2.5GB might be "enough" in sheer technicality but if you're installing a full-blown GUI with all the frills, that doesn't leave a lot to actually live in.
I personally like a "full frills" install when I do my linux installs, so 40GB is a decent size to accommodate that.
As for the Windows apps, you may have some luck installing some of them through WINE. I've had intermittent luck with doing that myself- most of the time it's just playing with the required dll's until you get things in place to work correctly. The best luck I had was by placing WINE into XP emulation, and then copying the entire system32 directory from a WinXP box. I wasn't able to get some of the more complex programs (like MS Office and other high-overhead apps) working, but I had fairly decent luck with a lot of different games and apps by smaller companies using WINE.
A lot of the apps (like Office, PhotoShop, etc.) have open source counterparts that work in similar fashion (OpenOffice, GIMP, etc.), and can understand the MS formats, so those may be options to replace some of your apps.
If you have significant functionality that you want to preserve with the apps that you currently have, I'd recommend going the dual-boot method until you can verify which apps will work (or can be replaced with open source equivalents) and which apps will take more time than you want to spend to make work, before eliminating your Windows partition completely.
I actually used another Linux based product Gparted on a live cd to fix that problem. I defragged my Windows install (a couple of times) rebooted into Windows and let it come all the way up. I inserted the Gparted cd, restarted and it booted into the Gparted software. This let me reduce the sized of the Windows OS drive and free up 40gb for Linux. I created a swap partition and a ext4 partition. Then I booted my Ubuntu cd and went through the install, I pointed it to the free partition and it took care of the rest. It also installed the GRUB boot loader that displays a menu ot startup to select which OS to boot. I cleaned this up a little as far as the descriptions and set the default to be Windows after 10 seconds (again for the wife) and have never looked back.
Supposedly you can shrink the drive within Windows but I could never get that to work.
Really, it's the same principle... Linux is as alien to Windows as HPUX, Solaris, OSX, or any other OS built around UNIX guidelines and not Microsoft ones.