Question

[Mark Kane]

DAVID NOURIAN wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 1. If I decide to change to FreeBSD from WinXP, will I still be
> able to run my windows programs?

Yes and no. There is a program called WINE that does run some Windows
applications (http://www.winehq.com/) but not all. That's an ongoing
effort. Another option for running Windows software inside FreeBSD would
be an emulator like Qemu or VMWare. Then you could actually install
Windows to a virtual disk image and run it from inside FBSD. All
programs would work but running the virtual Windows would be a bit
slower than a real Windows install.

When I made the move to FreeBSD from Windows for my desktop machines as
well (I had previously only used FBSD for servers), I was worried about
all my applications since I do a lot of audio production and streaming.
If you already use programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice,
X-Chat, gAIM, Audacity, VLC, GIMP, Azureus, etc, then those are
available natively for FreeBSD without the need for any emulation.

There are also tons of other free and open source programs to run on
FreeBSD that can do what you need to do. Check out
http://www.freebsd.org/ports/ for a list of 13,500+ applications that
you can install very easily. Some examples would be Abiword for word
processing, XMMS for a Winamp like media player, gFTP for a graphical
FTP client, NVU for a free WYSIWYG web editor, and many many more.

> 2. Can I ran WinXP for my Applications & FreeBSD as a web server?
>     Note: I have 2 HD's on my system & have ordered a 3rd HD to be
>     used as a web server HD .

You could have FreeBSD on one drive and Windows XP on another and dual
boot, but that wouldn't be reliable for serving. You could run one of
the operating systems inside a virtual machine like Qemu or VMWare, but
I personally wouldn't want to run FreeBSD in a VM that is running on
Windows....to me that defeats the purpose of having a stable serving OS
if the host OS that the VM is running on is unstable.

Going the other way, you could have FreeBSD as the main OS and then
install Qemu and put the disk image for your WinXP install on that other HD.

HTH

-Mark

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