@@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.
@@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.
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!
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
@@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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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
We really have it easy these days with how good Wine and Proton have gotten, to the point where Windows executables can run pretty much flawlessly on Linux. Still, this is very similar to the approach of just installing a VM that's still useful today, and just like today running games doesn't seem to really work.
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 👍
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!
wow I wonder when was last time I hear someone mentioned LiLO! I'm using RH6.1 on one of my old computers, it works great. First time hearing about Win4Lin though.
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.
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.
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.
17:24 wow. It's the first time I've seen this version of Clippy. And I have used Windows 98. Although I was a child and all I was doing on that system was playing games
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.
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.
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?
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.
huh originally i thought it would be something like Wine but using actuall Windows system files but this is just a virtual machine, its still pretty cool but not at all what i exptected
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...
I mean, it's a good way to support FOSS if that's what it is. For example, Armour is GPLv3 but only distributes source code for free; for compiled binaries, you either need to diy or pay for them.
If that was an option when I was younger using Redhat back in 2000, I would have tried it with music making applications as that was the only reason I got into computers sooo... yeah, I would have tried installing my soundblaster awe32 driver disks, ati rage pro disk and then cakewalk audio pro and soundforge 4.5, all of which do require directx 6. Linux back then did NOT work well for midi and audio and most certainly not stable enough for even one song or wav file recording soo.. yeah again. Linux was fun to tinker with until it wasn't.
To celebrate 15 years of being on youtube, you opened a nice well-aged box of wine
Was... that a pun?
r/angryupvote
thank you for making me chuckle; i needed it today.
lmao good one
hehehe
We got linux subsystem for windows way before windows subsystem for linux lmao
that's wine (linux subsystem for windows).. this is a virtual machine.... wine project was started in early 90s.
@@safi164 this is more close to wsl than wine is, but ikr, let me be
@@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.
@@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.
@@kFY514i kinda forgot wsl1 existed lol
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.
Accurate...
Adorable...
Now you are the comments
exactly the same as I thought
The bones of justice
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!
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
A good Linux distro and DOSBOX - you could make that happen!
@@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.
I can't even begin to imagine the hidden horrors that lie behind that kernel code to make this travesty possible. I love it!
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!
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
I was a Diehard Linux & Windows fan so, congrats for your 15 years on RUclips! 🎉
23:27 Finally, the unstoppable force of DOOM met the immovable Win4Lin
And that might've been something that could be worked out but there just wasn't time
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.
I used win4lin way back then! I'd forgotten all about it.
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!
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.
What a normal Surfshark advertisement, I didn't know that was possible
Happy 15 years on YT!!
The wine before wine
fyi, wine is a windows emulator for the linux and mac folks
@@djtomoy wine isnt an emulator
@@djtomoyWine Is Not an Emulator. It is a Windows to POSIX system call translation layer.
@@djtomoywine means Wine Is Not an Emulator. But yeah kinda like an emulator but it’s a translation layer.
@@djtomoy Wine isn't an emulator, it's a compatibility layer for UNIX like systems to run Windows programs.
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
because win4lin does reverse engineer Windows API calls.
@TeraunceFoaloke oh
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
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.
@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.
Finally Linux Subsystem for Windows.
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?
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
The earliest I've been lmao
What a way to start my morning :D
We really have it easy these days with how good Wine and Proton have gotten, to the point where Windows executables can run pretty much flawlessly on Linux. Still, this is very similar to the approach of just installing a VM that's still useful today, and just like today running games doesn't seem to really work.
Those old games, like Doom, run easily on Linux today, especially with Steam :)
TWO VIDEOS IN A DAY?!?!THANK YOU FOR 15 YEARS OF MAKING MY INNER WINDOWS FAN BE AN EXPLOSIVE NERD!!!!
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.
We have crossover and wine these days
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 👍
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!
window in linux??! 😮
i never thought id see the day !!!
amazing!
this is a certified obscure software banger!
wow I wonder when was last time I hear someone mentioned LiLO! I'm using RH6.1 on one of my old computers, it works great. First time hearing about Win4Lin though.
Not that big, but still interesting video for a 15th anniversary! Happy Birthday to your channel!🎉
0:43 Here guys, is the primitive Wine
That’s a well aged box of wine
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.
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.
It went so fast in the boot of Windows 98!!! I've never seen this boot that fast!
22:28 ah yes, VM_DIED. My favorite error message.
Michael really loves Linux XD
Because it doesn't force corporate crap down every single avenue.
@@cameronbosch1213 Depends of what you choose :-) But this is surely the case compared to Michaelsoft Binbows.
I use Arch by the way
3:15
20 years? more like 25 years
time flies
I remember back in the days reading about Win4Lin in books and magazines, it's the first time I see what it actually is.
Pretty early on this vid,was in my feed.Always interesting videos.
This is amazing!
I really want to see an attempt at a Windows Upgrade Saga on this!
Wouldn't go very far, maybe ME might still work but yeah...
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.
3:19 Not 20, but 25 years
"Over twenty years" includes "over twenty-five years"
woah it's been 17 minutes since upload
13:30 I wonder how similar did windows explorer and gnome's file manager look
Win, Lin! They rhymed!
0:01 We found Him, the *Red Hat* Man
17:24 wow. It's the first time I've seen this version of Clippy. And I have used Windows 98. Although I was a child and all I was doing on that system was playing games
That was the Office 97 version of Clippy.
Happy 15th! 🎉
"ITS NOT JUST WINE! STOR CALLING IT THAT!!"
everyone who reads this is a mjd fan
Meddl auf!
Sub then
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.
Something to try would be doom8088 or 8086 I forget. There's a real mode port of doom.
MJD is the kind of guy that will find devices that CAN'T run Doom
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.
Huh that's a cool WinClassic style Linux desktop. How do I recreate that?
GNOME 1.
This is awesome. I wonder why this strategy was abandoned for WINE.
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?
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.
Who did program this? It seems very impressive! Especially when you take this is develop in the late 90s.
this is wild. wine before wine.
9:06 it was busy because PWD of the terminal was inside /mnt/cdrom
Interesting, I've been using Linux for 20 years and I never heard of Win4Lin.
huh originally i thought it would be something like Wine but using actuall Windows system files but this is just a virtual machine, its still pretty cool but not at all what i exptected
5:40 Attack of the GNOME 1 series! 😂
Was cool to see GNOME in a form that was actually fun to use and customizable.
@@joe--cool Same here.
4:31 I watched a lot of Surfshark Academy's shorts.
Hello, Universe.
Are there ISOs of this for me to use it on a VM?
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...
So it is a Windows subsystem... For Linux.
imagine a modern version of this, I would switch to it on the spot and just run everything I need from there.
It's called a VM with shared folders or wine
looking glass kvm
Need a new version of this. Is there one.
Honestly can't believe you have to open terminal for something you paid $80 for. You'd expect a more streamlined experience!
4:32 did you know that Surfshark had a YT channel just like you
IM NINE MINUTES EARLY YAYYYYY IM SO GLAD YOUPOSTED
This is cool af
this is funny because windows now runs linux as a native process
why is he making so many linux videos now????? WE NEVER GOT WINDOWS 7 ON THE NINTENDO WII (/j)
i remember this one! this and lindows
Win for Lin? Sounds like the 2012 Knicks
I hate that it changes the size of the system fonts.
Challenge: build the best possible NT 4.0 pc.
Or just ignore me. As you please, Micheal.
Wahoo
I REmember using Win4Lin, It didnt goso Well LOL
Nice!
imagine paying $100 for a Linux program today
I mean, it's a good way to support FOSS if that's what it is. For example, Armour is GPLv3 but only distributes source code for free; for compiled binaries, you either need to diy or pay for them.
I would
the fact this shit boots faster than vmware and vb makes me wonder why it cant be as fast as today
mjd day 🎉🎉🎉🎉
Is it possible to learn this power for today systems like Debian 12? c:
What would happen if you update the windows from 98 -> 2000 -> XP within win4lin?
but why redhat and not ubuntu ?????
I, LIKE, Windows 7!!! Basically the best looking OS ever. !!!
Windows Vista and 7 were the peak of Windows design imo. After that, Windows sucked.
@@cameronbosch1213 Thats basically when the downfall of Windows, at the looks falled... !,!,!,!,
yeaaaay!
My frist linux experience was red hat linux. I can't remember if it was 5 or 6. Somewhere in between 5 or 6 i think.
The earliest form of Windows apps on Linux...?
WINE was earlier
nice vid
Awesome
im sad that you didnt try doom95
Hell yeah
now we have wine
NROFF and TROFF you don't know that?
If that was an option when I was younger using Redhat back in 2000, I would have tried it with music making applications as that was the only reason I got into computers sooo... yeah, I would have tried installing my soundblaster awe32 driver disks, ati rage pro disk and then cakewalk audio pro and soundforge 4.5, all of which do require directx 6. Linux back then did NOT work well for midi and audio and most certainly not stable enough for even one song or wav file recording soo.. yeah again. Linux was fun to tinker with until it wasn't.