Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 15:24:40 +0800 (GMT)
From: Orlando Andico <orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph>
To: "G.W. Owen" <mad14 AT cc DOT keele DOT ac DOT uk>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: OpenDOS: Win95 emu? Why the hell not!!!
In-Reply-To: <5cnnn8$n5g@gerry.cc.keele.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.93.970130151900.557A-100000@gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On 29 Jan 1997, G.W. Owen wrote:

> : 
> I know that Caldera WABI is proprietory, but does anyone know how
> closely it emulates Win 3.1
> 

WABI is _guaranteed_ to run Office 4.3, Lotus SmartSuite, and a host of
other packages. Maybe that's 100% emulation, I don't know. See the WABI
home page at WWW.SUN.COM for a more comprehensive list.

WABI is miserably slow on SPARC hardware. On a Sun SPARCstation 10 (40MHz
SuperSPARC) which is roughly equal to a P75 in integer performance, WABI
runs at about the speed of a 386-20.

On Solaris x86 or Linux x86 hardware, WABI is _much_ faster because it's
running on the native processor. Check out Caldera's testimonials page
(which includes one by Linus, amazingly..) and they claim that the
combination of Linux+WABI cannot be distinguised from DOG+Windoze on the
same hardware. Only catch is, for Linux+WABI you need 24MB RAM to do
anything useful, a far cry from the 4MB with Windoze 3.1. But then, with
RAM prices at about $150 for 32MB, it's not so bad. Besides, with tons of
RAM in your Linux box, you'll love it when you're _not_ running WABI :)

Of course X is much more capable than Windoze, and X alone eats up about
8MB of core. Plus, BASH eats >1MB, XTerm eats 3MB (almost all the X
utilities are overkill, thus the amazing size) so 24MB to run Windoze 3.1
under Linux is not so surprising (FWIW, Sun recommends 32MB on SPARC
hardware).
 

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| Orlando Andico                email: orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph |
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