A new segment in the sphere of operating systems seems to build up. Somewhere between the paid-for Windows operating systems and the open-source Linux systems a new kind of offerings comes up: They are cheap or free, they are easy to install and to use (windows lookalikes) and.... They run Windows applications. One sample is Linux XP Desktop (free download, $40) which is built on Red-Hat Linux and offers a GUI that appeals to users that are familiar with Windows. And it is able to run many Windows applications out-of-the-box. Another sample is ReactOS, which is in an early alpha stage currently. Yes, it's true: Even PRTG Traffic Grapher can be run on this Linux system. The secret ingredient is called Wine.
"Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available." I am really impressed by how far the Wine developers have come in their work to port the Windows API to Linux systems. PRTG is not at all an easy task to run on a Linux box since we had to put in a lot of system calls in order to get all the features we want to have for our product. All these system calls must be processed by the Windows emulator. For the coming months it will be interesting to see how these products and the Wine project will evolve. Microsoft won't like it, but there are some usage scenarios in the near future where it will be sufficient to use a Wine based operating system to run Windows apps and one can save the money for the Windows license.
If you want to try running PRTG on Linux yourself, here is what you need:
Note: You should use exactly the Mozilla installer above, because the "official" MozillaControl1712.exe installer has a problem in that the control is compiled with MSVC6 but some MSVC .Net DLLs were packaged instead of the MSVC6 one. This makes it unusable out of the box. The download link above was tested to run fine.
Voila, PRTG runs on Linux!
A number of issues is still unsolved yet:
One tip for Wine: If you happen to have a crashed window of a Windows EXE that blocks everything else, run the command "wineserver -k" to kill the Windows emulation process and with it all Windows apps.
