Win4Lin - Running Windows on Linux... 2000s Style!

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Win4Lin was a way for Linux users to run Windows programs on a handful of distros. It's approach to virtualization is different from more traditional solutions like VMware, but it claimed to offer native speeds and faster performance. So today, we're gonna see how it works!
Win4Lin 2.0: archive.org/de...
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#MichaelMJD #Linux #Windows

[@senpaqii]

To celebrate 15 years of being on youtube, you opened a nice well-aged box of wine

[@a_googIeuser]

Was... that a pun?

[@TeraunceFoaloke]

r/angryupvote

[@gscodeseeker]

thank you for making me chuckle; i needed it today.

[@andaro.77]

lmao good one

[@golem-of-thoughts]

hehehe

[@lian_drake]

We got linux subsystem for windows way before windows subsystem for linux lmao

[@safi164]

that's wine (linux subsystem for windows).. this is a virtual machine.... wine project was started in early 90s.

[@lian_drake]

@@safi164 this is more close to wsl than wine is, but ikr, let me be

[@SoulcatcherLucario]

​@@safi164wine is a translation layer for windows functions and isn't anything like wsl, which runs an entire operating system. lin4win acts more-or-less like the same thing that wsl would.

[@kFY514]

@@SoulcatcherLucario Fun fact: WSL1 didn't really run Linux (as in, the Linux kernel) at all, instead translating Linux APIs much the same as Wine does. WSL2 does indeed run a paravirtualized, modified Linux kernel instead, as the translation layer approach turned out to have too many limitations for a lot of use cases. There was also an open source project in the mid-to-late-2000s called coLinux which also offered a way of running the Linux kernel as a Windows process, but that also was pretty finicky.

[@SoulcatcherLucario]

​@@kFY514i kinda forgot wsl1 existed lol

[@theodricaethelfrith]

I had this back in the day. It was magical. I had Windows on a different virtual console than X, and could switch back and forth between operating systems like they were desktops. It was actually faster and more stable than running Windows natively, somehow.

[@JORGETECHJorge]

I can't even begin to imagine the hidden horrors that lie behind that kernel code to make this travesty possible. I love it!

[@suobset]

I am so used to binging your old videos it didn’t even occur this was uploaded a minute ago. I was searching for the comments.

[@DobiTech]

Accurate...

[@Dr.Mohandes]

Adorable...

[@goncalojaneiro4657]

exactly the same as I thought

[@HaakonAnderson]

The bones of justice

[@BACON_PLAYZ1-s3n]

I love Vintage computer software like mjd This is why i'm subscribed

[@GeeFunk84]

Save a humble office PC from turning into e-waste starting this October. As Win10 is to be phased out, many companies will opt for just replacing the old units with new ones. Adopt one from your nearest company and let that be your dedicated Doom-machine!

[@plushifoxed]

forget "starting this october", in most corporate environments this is already happening right now. lots of perfectly good hardware that would be plenty fast with an SSD but are just arbitrarily not getting win11 by microsoft's rules are getting junked, great time to pick up cheap hardware

[@melonhead122908]

A good Linux distro and DOSBOX - you could make that happen!

[@kbhasi]

@@plushifoxed Yep! My local public library system already upgraded to Windows 11 early last year, but I think that was also because they had it with HP and switched to Dell PCs and Brother printers.

[@YTPewp]

I hate that they're dropping support. I understand it's 10 years old, but I like this version far better than Windows 11. Now I'm basically forced to "upgrade". 😒 I'm hoping they release another new version of Windows soon after so I don't have to stick with it for long.

[@TronNerd82]

Fun fact: there was also a counterpart to Win4Lin called Win4BSD, designed to run on FreeBSD

[@Speed-Daemon-123]

No, that never happened.

[@TronNerd82]

@@Speed-Daemon-123 A quick search will show otherwise. Some noteworthy results for Win4BSD include results from FreshPorts, OSNews, Wikipedia, and various mailing list archives from the era.

[@Speed-Daemon-123]

@@TronNerd82 fortunately for me, I'm not dumb. No, Win4Lin never sold a "counterpart" product called Win4BSD. That never happened. I know without using a search engine, because I lived it. People who get all their intelligence from the Internet get what they paid for.

[@R3troBoi]

Wow, this video takes me back to the early 2000s! Nostalgia overload! I've always been fascinated by the possibilities of running different operating systems on different platforms. Keep up the great work, Michael!

[@vaibhavmishra5179]

23:27 Finally, the unstoppable force of DOOM met the immovable Win4Lin

[@InfernosReaper]

And that might've been something that could be worked out but there just wasn't time

[@rdmytuser6695]

try something older without DOS4GW

[@adamsfusion]

This is honestly really neat. I knew of Win4Lin around this time, but couldn't afford it. I had no idea it was so integrated in with Linux. That's honestly pretty crazy.

[@Jdbye]

Basically, this is Windows Subsystem for Linux, but actually **for Linux**, over 15 years before Microsoft did it. And that is just really cool. It's probably full of serious security issues, but if you don't need the security of a full VM, then honestly it's not a bad tradeoff to have direct file system access between Linux and Windows. To this day, there isn't really a good way to do that. This was way ahead of its time.

[@StephenHenryIrl]

This is an amazing video, really brings me back. The best/most annoying part is you managed to get win98 running inside Linux with less effort than it too me to get Linux itself running back in the day!

[@StopChangingUsernamesYouTube]

For real. It was always* just fight the xorg.conf boss and win, then the world is your oyster. *And then wifi came around and gave us a few mini-bosses along the way.

[@dave_beanie]

The wine before wine

[@djtomoy]

fyi, wine is a windows emulator for the linux and mac folks

[@imadam]

@@djtomoy wine isnt an emulator

[@cameronbosch1213]

​@@djtomoyWine Is Not an Emulator. It is a Windows to POSIX system call translation layer.

[@lian_drake]

@@djtomoywine means Wine Is Not an Emulator. But yeah kinda like an emulator but it’s a translation layer.

[@sofiaknyazeva]

@@djtomoy Wine isn't an emulator, it's a compatibility layer for UNIX like systems to run Windows programs.

[@andresbravo2003]

I was a Diehard Linux & Windows fan so, congrats for your 15 years on KZbin! 🎉

[@pcpanikMusik]

The installation process would have overwhelmed 98% of Windows 98 users. At the time, I also wanted to take a closer look at Linux, but Windows was definitely more user-friendly.

[@gatitogamer6497]

0:43 Here guys, is the primitive Wine

[@Eyetrauma]

I'm always really curious about old VM software like this. Having lived through it and into the 'modern' software I'm always kind of amazed at how in some ways we're moving backwards: between VirtualBox and VPC I feel like I was able to run old OSes with better ergonomics than with things like HyperV and VMWare *now*. From some brief research it sounds like this actually used software called Merge which traces way back to the DOS days. Impressive the kind of speed they got out of it. I love how integration with Linux itself actually gives this a kind of paravirtualization capability.

[@dionorgua]

I used this long time ago. Much newer version (on RedHat 9), but it was exactly same experience. This is very interesting piece of technology. Originally it was called SCO Merge. It was really much faster than full system emulators like VMWare. Note that it was doing patching of actual Windows code to run as is in user space without emulation/translation. And that's why it was tied to specific Windows versions. The coolest thing was integration with xdm/kdm. It was adding itself to login screen as additional desktop environment. So that it was possible to choose KDE/Gnome/Windows

[@athurV1]

Nixe points mentioned , would be good if someone knows how to make an update to run direct x , that would be magic .

[@johnruschmeyer5769]

This brings back some memories. Back in the mid-2000s, they made Win4Lin (some later version) free or very cheap. I remember running it for a brief while under one of the first Ubuntu releases. Sadly, the community kernel support dried up soon after.

[@TroubledTrooper]

Red Hat Linux had such a cool logo and branding, almost makes me wish Fedora was named Red Hat Personal Linux as opposed to Enterprise or something.

[@SenileOtaku]

Doesn't matter much. I'm purging Fedora off of all my systems and moving back to Linux Mint (or OpenMandriva, thanks to Bryan Lunduke).

[@Nogoon69]

thanks for so many years of continuous content! These videos have taught me so much about obscure tech that I would have never found myself! Keep up the good work man 👍

[@willy.c]

For the early 2000s this is hella impressive. Heck. This is impressive now

[@-throat-]

4:18 “Rusty Staples” will be my stage name from now on

[@dangero2000]

I heard there's a version of Win4Lin that supports 2000 and XP, (version 4.0 I think, according to the Wikipedia article). Maybe Doom will work on that one? You know, newer version and all that?

[@pr0ntab]

The reason why it didn't work is because win4lin uses the VMM in Intel PCs to implement the virtualization hook to allow DOS-based windows to run on top of Linux, but so does Doom when it runs natively on a system. So they conflict and it doesn't work. Meanwhile the newer versions of win4lin are full emulation so they could just run dos and doom on top of that (dos Doom doesn't run well at all on windows 2000/XP for the same reasons so you'd have to run a Windows port instead if that was the goal)

[@dangero2000]

@@pr0ntab Wow, I didn't know Doom essentially ran in a VM. That's pretty cool. So it's like a precursor to Venv or something like?

[@pr0ntab]

@@dangero2000 nah it's just that it uses protected mode extensions (DPMI) which puts DOS itself into a sort of virtual machine that was introduced in the 386 (the virtual 8086 mode) so that they don't interfere but Doom itself can access the hardware fully like Windows 95 itself would. Doom and many dos games of that era contain what are essentially drivers for all the video, network, and sound cards they supported and took control of the computer like an operating system. If they want to be able to still talk to DOS for access to hard drives and other things then they need that capabilities that DPMI provides. But that's going to interfere with other applications that use the same feature of the processor and Win4lin is doing just that. It kinda works inside out but it can't handle something that is using similar tricks inside it since it doesn't know (and the processor doesn't support) nesting. Modern virtualization extensions in 64 bit processors that help accelerate virtualization are designed to be nestable somewhat so you can have a VM inside of a VM on a host system if that's useful to you. Those work a little differently. The old VM86 stuff was really only designed to let old DOS/real mode applications live inside something in protected mode so you could use older software and that's basically it.

[@mhadjih]

It went so fast in the boot of Windows 98!!! I've never seen this boot that fast!

[@MikołajBakalarski]

Happy 15 years on YT!!

[@ZyokoCloudstar]

22:28 ah yes, VM_DIED. My favorite error message.

[@iodreamify]

Quite ingenious going as far as patching the kernel. Wonder if we'll ever get more of these marketable products for Windows integration on Linux.

[@memediatek]

We have crossover and wine these days

[@SidcupRC]

KVM

[@Akselmoi]

I love seeing old Linux stuff, hope to see more :D

[@Horibyte]

The earliest I've been lmao What a way to start my morning :D

[@vvgr409]

Finally Linux Subsystem for Windows.

[@Aeduo]

I would have to assume Doom failed due to lack of protected more DOS support. Its protected mode support for running windows is probably a big hack and the C drive on DOS is probably just some DOS share thing, so it probably totally falls apart when a DOS application tries to enter protected mode. Either that or maybe something with the video mode or something.

[@Aeduo]

Something to try would be doom8088 or 8086 I forget. There's a real mode port of doom.

[@lupinzar]

I was thinking protected mode issues as well.

[@bruce11121314]

That jump cut at 09:09, how long did it take to realise you were in the /mnt/cdrom dir which was causing that error?

[@Roboterpunk]

For 2000 this is one impressive piece of software. Thanks for showing this.

[@Stone_Rock]

3:15 20 years? more like 25 years time flies

[@meowyahh]

this is a certified obscure software banger!

[@Dudus366]

Not that big, but still interesting video for a 15th anniversary! Happy Birthday to your channel!🎉

[@sammy_salt]

And now you can run windows and Linux on your android phone. It's crazy we've come so far from windows 95

[@bennetfox]

Linux has tab completion and will fill in file names and directories if it can find them. You can also press the up arrow to scroll through previously typed in commands at the command line prompt. And lastly, if a window opens partially outside of the screen area, hold down control and click anywhere on the window and you should be able to drag it back to the screen.

[@Khaos817]

I love the history of Linux and Linux software

[@GabrieleDAutilia-d7h]

TWO VIDEOS IN A DAY?!?!THANK YOU FOR 15 YEARS OF MAKING MY INNER WINDOWS FAN BE AN EXPLOSIVE NERD!!!!

[@sandyacker9108]

That’s a well aged box of wine

[@johnvanwinkle4351]

This is a neat product. I heard about it back in the days, never got a chance to use it. I will have to try it now.......grin. Thank for the great video!

[@cameronbosch1213]

5:40 Attack of the GNOME 1 series! 😂

[@joe--cool]

Was cool to see GNOME in a form that was actually fun to use and customizable.

[@cameronbosch1213]

@@joe--cool Same here.

[@captainter06]

Michael really loves Linux XD

[@cameronbosch1213]

Because it doesn't force corporate crap down every single avenue.

[@captainter06]

@@cameronbosch1213 Depends of what you choose :-) But this is surely the case compared to Michaelsoft Binbows.

[@CharlieFoxtrot]

I use Arch by the way

[@LouiesWorkshop]

I really want to see an attempt at a Windows Upgrade Saga on this!

[@memediatek]

Wouldn't go very far, maybe ME might still work but yeah...

[@skinwalker69420]

Why is this not a thing on modern Linux and Windows? This seems like it'd be much easier to manage than having to reverse engineer how Windows works like Wine

[@TeraunceFoaloke]

because win4lin does reverse engineer Windows API calls.

[@skinwalker69420]

@TeraunceFoaloke oh

[@AtoManPL]

Back then CPUs didn't really support virtualization so you'd basically emulate the whole PC, nowadays it's kinda obsolete when you can have a native VM working flawlessly

[@safi164]

Its a virtual machine basically an early hypervisor.. Modern Linux has a native support for this.. Its called KVM... You need a copy of Windows on a virtual machine and GPU passthrough is not so straight forward and he GPU emulation it exists for Windows 11 but is not meant for gaming and is slow.. Using Wine/Proton you don't need a copy of Windows and you can run games as well via dxvk and vkd3d which is a vulkan compatibility layar for modern directx... So modern Windows compatiblity layer in Linux is superior to this.. The issue comes when stuff like anti-cheat or DRMs had to access the kernel directly that is where many of the games and windows software which need kernel access fails.

[@skinwalker69420]

@safi164 I know how KVM works, I've even run Windows like this several times. He explained in the video how it's not a VM.

[@djtomoy]

window in linux??! 😮 i never thought id see the day !!! amazing!

[@waylandsmithers2815]

Apparently 5.5 supported the 2.6.x kernel... food for thought!

[@michaelsanchez1361]

Fun Fact there is a project called longene, linux kernel module which allow to run windows directly on linux including drivers

[@TeoMininum]

Windows 95... And what a memory. One of my best experiences. I miss those days so much

[@Speed-Daemon-123]

I had a copy of this back in the day. For me it was a chance to try out Merge, that I had read about but never saw in the wild. I had been using VMware since beta, and Win4Lin didn't do anything better. WINE was in its infancy then, but IME it was a better way to run Windows programs in Linux for most people. I had been running NT4 within Caldera Linux for some time, and was adept at alt-tabbing between NT and KDE environments, but what I really wanted was for application windows to show up without having to switch to a different desktop. Citrix offered that, and while I worked in a Citrix shop, nobody there saw fit to buy the add-on to serve individual Windows applications to the X11 desktop. Note that Doom couldn't run because it uses a DOS extender, and a DOS extender can't run in V86 mode that Win4Lin (and Merge) used for DOS environments.

[@WWammyy]

Yes I remember win4lin back when I was attempting to experimenting with different linux distributions like. Mandrake, Redhat, Ubuntu, Fedora + Gentoo

[@pete904ni]

I'd love to know the actual use case for this back in the day. Who is using this instead of running windows?

[@eriksiers]

I did, a *very* long time ago...

[@curiouspharmacy4775]

This was so much simpler.. I love the instant file sharing but that switching between sessions is sooo far ahead of its time.

[@robmcleod2876]

I used win4lin way back then! I'd forgotten all about it.

[@LovelyAlanna]

you know... this is a really good idea, even now that wine is quite decent having this kind of subsystem with windows would give better compatibility

[@bigdog8302]

When I was very young, I dreamed of a computer that would boot to a GUI desktop in ROM and have icons for Windows, DOS, Linux, Mac OS, AmigaOS, OS/2 and even BeOS. Of course, there'd have to be CPU, sound, and graphic cards built in the machine for non-Intel OSes. Plus, the ability to run each machine in a window and share files across all platforms. Yes, it was a very expensive dream, LOL. With today's technology, this can all be easily be done. Think of it as a VM hardware and firmware (not software so much).

[@SSFvd2vo]

At first I thought this was an unrelated ancient Linux distro (one intended to run linux by boot from within Windows). Nice find

[@SenileOtaku]

There was a linux version/toolkit for that. You installed your linux distribution inside a directory on the MSWindows drive. Can't remember the name of it.

[@eriksiers]

Win4Lin 5 dropped kernel 2.2 support and moved to 2.4, adding support for WinMe. V6 added support for kernel 2.6 and moved to Win2k/XP.

[@cmahte]

DOS full screen: Ctrl-Alt-1 (through 6). Login with the same credentials you use in KDM. then run the dos command. And it likely will run doom because it's not X, but just a console.

[@cmahte]

Alternatively you could "init 3' (boot without X) if you're really trying to up the frame rate... it will make doom basically the only heavy process running. (It's been 2 decades since I ran red hat... maybe you need init 2 or init 1 to run without X. The sys 5 protocol is 3 = fully boot but not X, 5 = fully boot with X, but at somepoint a lot of systems made 3 the graphic boot mode.)

[@PC4USE1]

Pretty early on this vid,was in my feed.Always interesting videos.

[@ezekielaesland1254]

You can try Solaris OS? .-.

[@shibotto]

I remember back in the days reading about Win4Lin in books and magazines, it's the first time I see what it actually is.

[@DaVince21]

6:40 This picture right here tells me that they don't patch the running kernel, but rather it just installs another version of the kernel alongside the stock one, which the system will then boot off. That means that _technically_ this could run just fine on probably most distros of the time that used/supported a kernel around that version number. And even if it does crash, you can just go back to your working kernel from the boot menu. Even the "LILO only" support might not be a barrier. It's probably just this installer script that can only set it up for LILO but a GRUB config could be made manually instead. More effort, of course. Edit: ah. Yeah. Some of this is already explained in the video, haha.

[@AnonyDave]

Seeing a kernel compiled with egcs is sure a blast from the past. I'm pretty sure there were major issues with that specific configuration and people got really pissed off at redhat. Wasn't helped by gcc dragging their heels on a bunch of useful features, but glad it did all eventually kinda get sorted out Or maybe I'm thinking of one of the other weird kernel things redhat did in that era

[@meghanelliott5273]

I have an old emachines laptop that is running windows 7 if you are interested in it. Just let me know. I love your channel and your content. Keep up the amazing work

[@dashcharger24]

Who did program this? It seems very impressive! Especially when you take this is develop in the late 90s.

[@rawiri8]

3:19 Not 20, but 25 years

[@TyDurr1]

"Over twenty years" includes "over twenty-five years"

[@thomasbohl6924]

Interesting, never saw Win4Lin in action. I had VMWare, which could start a Windows-VM using an existing partition. Which was very practical on a dual-boot setup.

[@AndreiNeacsu]

I think that the Doom (and possibly Duke3D or Quake) issue is due to the special memory managers that come with those games.

[@garyharrison4915]

Thats actually amazing.

[@verizonthegamer]

Congrats for your stay in KZbin for 15 years, but we miss Eddy Trustman, he's not there in the computer table.... :(

[@laurafreeman5278]

Make A Video On Testing Out “WinCDEmu” According To Wikipedia, it’s an open-source utility for mounting disk image files in Microsoft Windows. It installs a Windows device driver which allows a user to access an image of a CD or DVD as if it were a physical drive. WinCDEmu supports ISO, CUE/BIN, CCD/IMG, NRG, MDS/MDF and RAW formats

[@kFY514]

Oh the joy of paravirtualizing OSes that were never meant to be paravirtualized 😅 It's always technically impressive but weird and finicky, I always end up reverting to "normal" virtualization instead. In the late 2000s, you could do the reverse using a piece of software called coLinux, which was essentialy a special version of the Linux kernel that could run as a Windows process - and it suffered from many quirks as well. However, this concept kind of lives on as WSL. Also, I wonder what happens if you actually modify files on the virtual C drive from Linux, while Windows is running. Is Windows prepared to handle that? In some ways it might, given that it might happen with network shares, but then again all the drives appear in Explorer as fixed drives rather than network shares so I wonder whether that's handled properly...

[@iamgly]

wow, i didn't know about this software, that was impressive for the time !

[@pcpanikMusik]

Now that I see it, has anyone noticed that the arrangement of the colours (red, green, blue, yellow) in the Office logo is different from the Windows Start logo?

[@anon_y_mousse]

I can't help but wonder if either Xash or GZDoom would compile for 32-bit platforms. I would like to see something like this for modern Linux. WINE just doesn't feel the same, especially given that you can't "boot" into a Windows desktop with it. Using QEMU is just too laggy by comparison to something like Win4Lin.

[@gr-lf9ul]

Seems closer to (but worse than) dosbox than wine now, though early dosbox could not run win9x iirc. Also, missing the blue clouds and logo loading screen... does it have some trick for skipping some of the boot phases of windows, or is it just fast enough for them to not be noticeable? There might be some interesting lessons to be learned from its code even today. Wonder what could've things been like if the devs of this worked on dosbox instead, or even if they opened their source now.

[@bassybossy]

Funny how we now got Lin4Win after all these years! :P

[@furdoxspam]

woah it's been 17 minutes since upload

[@delofj]

I think this software sits between a virtual machine and something like WSL 2 but inverted But it’s not similar to something like wine or WSL 1, which uses a translation layer instead of a VM

[@Sithhy]

What's the Dell monitor you use? I kinda like it

[@kendawg_mcawesome]

Wow, this is impressive!

[@DimitrisChr]

Never knew this software existed. And I started using Linux around that time (~2002). It would have been perfect if I had this back then.

[@wildace4535]

Hey micheal i dont know if you will even read this comment but I was hoping if you had time of course maybe make a guide on how to get windows 11 to look like xp I watched your video you made roughly 4 years ago about it, but from what I can tell/reading in the newest comments, the shell program either doesn’t work or has a Trojan in it

[@0xEARTH]

Is it REALLY a viable computer if it can't run Doom?

[@philipcaseyacalloway204]

That is a very smart piece of software in theory

[@SamuelRaynor79]

Those shell scripts were executable. Running those with 'sh script.sh', instead of directly (./script.sh), may cause scripts not to run correctly if the interpreter in the file shebang wasn't 'sh'. (#!/bin/bash for example). Bash in sh-mode is not the same.

[@TyTytheCat2004]

I wonder how far you can upgrade the Windows version, before it breaks with Win4Lin. Imagine trying to run an NT-based version of Windows, after installing Windows 98. And if you can track down newer versions of Win4Lin, will you check out the last one?

[@theg-man]

What a normal Surfshark advertisement, I didn't know that was possible

[@dizwell]

Anyone else looking at that responsive, usable Gnome interface and getting strong whiffs of nostalgia ...and regret that somewhere along the line, we traded that for today's stodgy desktop environment? And actually, looking at a nice, usable Windows desktop was a change for the better, too...

[@KevinVeroneau]

Had no idea this piece of software existed, only knew of CodeWeaver's version of running Windows software on Linux, that I believe turned into Wine eventually. It ran surprisingly well. Would love if someone could try to analyze how it actually works under the hood, how it compares to say Wine, and what they did in their custom kernel. If Microsoft were to ever move away from NT to using a UNIX kernel, as Apple did with their titular OS X(not move from NT of course, but Apple's own kernel back then), I think this could be the way Microsoft would support legacy applications still, through a UNIX kernel Win32/64 API layer.

[@shockwaverc1369]

9:06 it was busy because PWD of the terminal was inside /mnt/cdrom

[@retro_black421]

Please tell me there is a modern open source version that at least supports all the way up to windows 7 and it still gets updated to this day or at least the most modern possible open source one I want it to play the exact same way (I forget the word you used) but more stable and fun I guess (I did stumble across something similar last year it was open source and it only supported XP and it had already been abandoned for many years and I couldn't even get it to install)

[@rage3225]

13:30 I wonder how similar did windows explorer and gnome's file manager look

[@gezeo750]

lol finally found something Doom doesn't run on.

[@maddam50]

This is awesome. I wonder why this strategy was abandoned for WINE.

[@wemelkuan]

The learning curve has a bit of a double standard too considering people don’t have as much of a trouble switching to macOS and it has a lot of the same compatibility quirks.

[@OfficialRaveBlitz]

This is amazing!