Has anyone tried to run RSLogix 500 on Linux using WINE? How about RSLinx Lite? My Windows machine is getting rather nefarious at crashing, locking, and spontaneously rebooting (without warning), and since I have worked with Linux some, I was looking at moving one of my machines to RH7.0 to do some of my desk-tied programming at. I just wanted to know if anyone had any experience trying this before I took the plunge, as it would make it an unsupported machine in the eyes of our "stellar" IT department..... Any advice, horror stories, or general comments appreciated. Thanks, --Joe Jansen

 

Joe: I have tried this some time ago... It wasn't very successful. It seems as though there is something specifically done in RSLogix (5 and 500) to check the environment that the software is running under. From what I remember, RSLogix checks an environment variable or 2. If they aren't set a certain way, RSLogix exits. This is exactly the behavior I remember seeing - RSLogix would exit almost immediately after running - no screens or dialog boxes or anything. Again, this was some time ago - I have not been able to get a recent version of WINE to compile on any of my computers for some time now. It seems that the WINE crew has something majorily messed up in the library dependancies and they are unwilling (or unable) to fix it. Of course, your mileage may vary... Of course, if enough people called Rockwell Software and "demanded" Linux support, maybe, just maybe they would do it... From what friends have told me (friends inside of RS), the software engineers have internally ported some RS products to Linux already - things like RSLinx. It's just that nobody in management wants to have a non-Microsoft based product on the market. ----- Ron Gage - Saginaw, MI ([email protected])

 

I recommend you using a product called Win4Lin (www.netraverse.com). It lets you install Windows 95/98 in the Linux filesystem. It is great. Windows starts in less than 10 seconds (depends on your setup). When windows crashes, you can restart it in that time. They have a demo version that is fully functional, but starts to pop messages after two hours of use. I personally do not use it, but I have a colleague who does and he says that windows applications run faster in it than in native Windows. He attributes the performace gain to the high performance ReiserFS filesystem. I also recommend you to try a Linux distribution that supports the ReiserFS filesystem (e.g. Suse, Mandrake) since it provides greater performance, and almost instant recovery after crashes. RedHat does not support ReiserFS. Regards, Vegeta

 

Win4Lin is going to cloud computing...

I have found Win4Lin sluggish...

I found VirtualBox and installed a copy of a virtual Windows Machine on it and installed RS-Logix on that virtual Machine...

Had no problems...