Very occasional need for Windows...

Hi, I use Linpus Lite on my Aspire One and am quite happy with it.

However I have a windows program that I would like to be able to run from it (very occasionally). The windows program controls a scientific instrument over an RS232 port. I have a USB-RS232 converter installed. The program was custom written for us, so no one else will have addressed any issues with it, and there will be no Linux equivalent. I believe it was written in Delphi and we should have the source code somewhere (or access to it) - but I don't see it being an easy job to recompile it. The good thing is it runs as a single standalone executable that needs no actual installation in windows.

I have tried to get it to run under Wine, but its not managing to work with the Com ports. From what I can tell it is writing data to the com port but its not managing to set up/control e.g. the buffer sizes, speeds etc and so not getting back data that is useful to it.

I will only need to run this program 4 or 5 times a year so I don't want to go have the disk space penalty of a full dual boot.

So my options seem to be:

(1) find a more up-to-date version of Wine (the repository has 0.9.47, but wine HQ is on 1.xx as stable release) in the hope that the com port issues are fixed (some people suggest they might be, others are still struggling). Anyone suggest best way to do this?
(2) look at alternative Windows emulators like Win4Lin. Anyone tried it? Anyone got experience with Com ports in it?
(3) find a way to make a windows bootable USB stick (anything post Win95 should be ok) and boot to stick - I believe this is harder than it sounds? what about booting to an SD card in the card slot?
(4) Recompile Delphi application in Linux - sounds beyond my expetise.
(5) Look at virtual machines - but I think that will be memory and disk space hungry?
(6) Keep lugging windows laptop to meetings where this program is required.

Anyone got any other ideas short of actually dual booting on the internal "drive"?

 

if you have an external dvd drive u can install to a flash drive by plugging it in before you boot from the dvd drive with the install disc. Choose the flash drive to install and run as normal. Obviously it will only work on this laptop, as Windows is hardware specific. Also, make sure that the flash drive is large enough to fit it, and that it is formatted to fat32 before you start.

 

Just to check I am understanding this?

Format a Flash Disk as FAT32. (Large enough to fit a full windows install)
Put the flash disk in one of the USB ports.
Put a removable DVD drive in.
Boot from Windows install disk in the dvd drive.
Install Windows to the Flash Drive (does it not need to be "Drive C" for that to work?)
Shutdown, remove DVD drive, reboot from the flash drive

I don't have a dvd drive - but I do have an old CD R/W drive on USB that Linpus even recognises - and if I am installing WinXP it comes on a CD so I guess that should work too?

thanks,

 

I use a programme which is only available under windows: the pocketreader, by which I can read DRM protected books. It does not run under wine.
It seems that nobody is willing to convert this reader which becomes more and more standard for e-books to Linux. So I see at present only one way to read DRM protected e-books on my AA1: build a USB stick or what I would prefer boot from an SD card, preferably from the extension slot which hides the card completely.
Has anybody tried to install a bootable XP system on an SD card and run it from the extension slot?
Since it is most probaly slow it is only for such applications like reading or editing text.

Winfried

 

Thats correct a USB CD drive would also work.

 

I have been reading elsewhere that installing from CD/DVD to USB drive/stick is not possible if there is another working drive in the machine (which there is with my Linux on it) - have you managed to do this? is there a "magic" trick?

 

Easiest way would be to open the Acer and disconnect the hard disc long enough to do this. That will solve that problem and you wont have to worry about fixing bootloaders afterward.

 

Try this, if youre too unsure to try the other way.
http://softarchive.net/os/windows_xp_us ... 33980.html