O'Reilly Network Weblogs: CodeWeavers brings Linux the benefits of Windows...and some of the drawbacks

Published on The O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/)
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3696

CodeWeavers brings Linux the benefits of Windows...and some of the drawbacks

by Andy Oram
Aug. 22, 2003

I really admire Wine (more than I ever admired it during the past 10 years when it was floundering toward stability) and particularly admire what CodeWeavers has achieved with Wine. I depend on CodeWeavers' Linux product so I can work on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files the same way my Windows-addicted colleagues work on them. As impressive as OpenOffice tools are, I'm just not confident I'll get the results my colleagues expect to see when I use OpenOffice to manipulate the MS Office files I share with these people.

But sometimes Wine and CodeWeavers work too well. They can make Linux bug-for-bug compatible with Windows. To illustrate this, I will describe an amusing incident that just happened to me while I was doing intensive work on a Word document.

Suddenly, during one of my attempts to save the file, I received the dreaded error message familiar to every prisoner of Windows: "Out of memory or disk space. Remove some files or close some applications..."The joke here is the error message was transparently lying--something that wouldn't be clear on a Windows system, but was clear here. I had used up only 75% of the disk space on my partition (although CodeWeavers does something strange I don't quite understand with fake Windows drives). And Linux was churning away happily; the free program showed no strain on the system. The problem was in Word and Word alone.

I plan to continue using MS Office products. In addition to the considerations I mentioned earlier, Word has some features I wish OpenOffice Writer had, and from brief trials I can tell that OpenOffice Impress is way behind PowerPoint in stability. But I don't like the realization that these office products have brought some of the craziness of Windows with them.

Andy Oram is an editor for O'Reilly Media, specializing in Linux and free software books, and a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. His web site is www.praxagora.com/andyo.