Win4Lin

» see win4lin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The problem Win4Lin solved was the one that kept Linux off office desktops for fifteen years. Somebody in the building needs a Windows application. It is usually one application, an accounting package or a thing a vendor wrote in Visual Basic in 1997, and it is the only reason the machine runs Windows at all. Win4Lin let that one application run in a window next to everything else, on a Linux desktop, without rebooting into a second operating system.

The code underneath was older than the product. It began as Merge at Locus Computing Corporation, which had been doing this kind of thing since the 1980s, and it changed hands repeatedly before landing at TreLOS and then at NeTraverse. NeTraverse shipped the first Win4Lin in 2000, aimed at the Windows 9x generation. When NeTraverse's assets were bought in 2005 by a company calling itself Win4Lin, Inc., the brand had outlived two owners already. Virtual Bridges, out of Austin, was the one that buried it.

There were really two products. Win4Lin 9x needed a patched kernel and ran the old consumer Windows releases at close to native speed, intercepting what the guest asked for instead of pretending to be hardware. Win4Lin Pro arrived in 2005 built on a tuned version of QEMU with the KQEMU accelerator, dropped the kernel patch requirement entirely, and ran Windows 2000 and XP. The second one was easier to install and slower, which is the trade everybody in virtualization made that decade.

I was at university through this window, in a department where Linux was on plenty of machines, and Win4Lin was a name I knew without ever buying. That was the common position. A commercial license in dollars, for a utility on an operating system people had chosen partly because it did not cost dollars, was a hard case to make in Turkey in 2004. Wine was free and unreliable. Dual-boot was free and worked, and the gap between those two was the only place Win4Lin could sell.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the kernel patch ~

The kernel patch is the part worth remembering, because it dates the product precisely. In 2001 you could ask a Linux user to apply a vendor patch to their kernel source and rebuild, and a meaningful fraction of them would do it, because building a kernel was a normal Tuesday. Win4Lin shipped pre-patched kernel packages for the distributions of the day to make it less painful. It still meant your Windows compatibility layer was coupled to your kernel version, and every kernel upgrade was a question about whether the thing you had paid for would still start.

By 2005 that bargain had expired. Distributions had gotten stricter about what they would ship, users had gotten less willing to compile anything, and the whole industry was moving toward virtualization that ran in user space and asked nothing of the kernel. Win4Lin Pro was the answer to that and it was a correct answer. It was also the point at which the product stopped being special, because once you are running a QEMU derivative you are in a race with QEMU.

~ what free did to it ~

VMware Player went free in 2005, and VirtualBox was released as open source two years after that, with Sun buying it in 2008. The one that settled the question was KVM, which landed in the mainline Linux kernel in 2007 and turned hardware-accelerated virtualization into a feature of the operating system rather than a purchase. Win4Lin 9x had already been discontinued on May 30, 2006. Version 5.5 shipped on February 18, 2009 and support for the desktop product ended in March 2010. Virtual Bridges had already moved its attention to Verde, a VDI product for enterprises, and win4lin.com was redirecting to the Virtual Bridges site by the time anyone checked. Today the domain serves a registrar lander of a hundred and fourteen bytes.

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