would like to run windows program on UNIX

[Mark Vollmers]

hi, all. Don't beat me up. really. I do have a reason. I've got some old 715/100 machines sitting around, and the suggestion was made from up above for me to try to configure these puppies up and plop them down on the shop floor. I don't need a whole lot to be running, just a web broswer (netscape), acrobat reader, and I'd like to put on mircosoft word (since we've got a lot of process sheets in word format).

I've done some searching around, and found one program called WINE that seems promising. does anyone have any experience with this? Does it work with HP (it lists FreeBSD)? is there something better? would linux allow me to work better (and will it work on the ws)? Thanks for the advice.

Mark

[Thomas Schler_1]

Mark,

> is there something better?

Yes: An Itanium workstation ...

[Martin Johnson]

Microsoft Word on unix?????

Do you really expect to get help on that????


Marty
:-)

P.S. I seem to remember seeing an article about 6 months ago about Microsoft sueing a company that developed an unix like OS than would run Microsoft products, but I can't rember for the life of me what it was called.

[Mark Vollmers]

the reason that I'm looking is that about five years ago I swear that I saw some engineers that had sun workstations that were running some emulation software and were running office on them. not really well, mind you, but running it. I'm not holding my breath, and it's not a big deal if I can't do it, but I'd end up looking REAL good if I could neatly tuck everything together. so far I've come up short, but I thought I'd ask.

Mark

[Rodney Hills]

You could run a product called winDD. You would need an NT server to actually run the MSWORD sessions, but the interaction would be through a X-window.

Do a search on "winDD" on the internet, you should be able to find more info.

-- Rod Hills

[harry d brown jr]

Mark,

Have you thought about Star-office from Sun?? It handles most WORD(puke) documents well.

live free or die
harry

[Jeff Schussele]

Mark,

M$ did port the core Office (Word, Excel, etc.) products to Sun several years ago. You probably saw that running.
They don't anymore.
I don't think Star is avail for HP-UX - pretty sure it's just Solaris & Linux.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Steve Labar]

I have seen Star Office convert MS Office documents before. That was using Linux, though. I have not seen a version for Star Office in HP-UX, yet.


Good Luck.
Steve

[A. Clay Stephenson]

There was a product called SoftWindows which ran Windows 3.1 on UNIX platforms. If you are truly brave, you can download the source for OpenOffice (essentially StarOffice which is quite good) from http://www.openoffice.org and have at it. Who knows, it might even compile and link.

[Bill Hassell]

As you can see, there is probably no bargain in those old machines (a lot of work to make Word documents visible). Since Netscape and Acrobat Reader are available for HP-UX, perhaps there is a way to convert all shop docs into PDF. Otherwise, cheap (slow) PCs are probably a better choice.

[S.K. Chan · Accepted solution]

Do you really want to install windows emulation on a 715 machine ? It was hip then but not anymore. If all you need is enable your users to view MS docs on a Unix box there is a product called QuickView Plus (I think by Inso Corp), we use it here on our Unix box. It renders MS docs and display it on X, nice thing about it is it reads the MS docs in its native format. That enables hardcore Unix guys to view say Word attachment that they get in elm. Down-side .. it's not free.
my $0.02

[Stefan Schulz]

Hi,

think what you saw on the Sun was the software Win3.1 emulator they had. There was also a additional board for Suns available which held an 486DX processor. The windows emulator was able to use this board.

But i never heard of an Sun or HP-UX emulator capable of running Win95/NT applications.

There is Wine, but i havn't seen a port to HP-UX.

But there is StarOffice. The new version is out as StarOffice and OpenOffice only for Windows, Solaris and Linux. Interesting is that the old version of StarOffice 5.x has been ported to HP-UX!

I don't know a download link, but perhaps the quys at http://www.openoffice.org could provide you one.

StarOffice 5.x is able to read most Word documents without any problem. You might not be able to read Office XP, but there are no problems e.g. with Office 97.

Hope this helps

Regards Stefan

[Thayanidhi]

Check

http://www.openpa.net/index.html

There are other OSs for HP-RISC. Possible choose the OS based on availability of Applications. This porting is genric, your hardware compatibility to be verified.

Supported OS for HPPA
---------------------
hp-ux
linux
netbsd
openbsd
nextstep
mklinux
hpbsd

I don't think this helps you!!??!!!!! Any way Good luck.

[Stefan Farrelly]

We used to run WABI on 10.20 which ran windows 3.1 and we ran word6.0 fine. Ive still got a copy lurking somewhere..... but you can only run Win3.11 and Word/Excel 6, nothing newer.

[benoit Bruckert]

I see 2 way for you :
1- you install Linux on your workstation and try wine, or open office . You will have to install from sources because it's an HP-PA, then compiling linking and so on... (not easy for open office).
2 - If it's just for viewing, you can tranform dynamically your word document in html (you can do also with Excel). I'm using such system to publish document on an intranet which convert on the fly these office documents (via a cgi handler-script in Apache ).
These tools are : wv for word and xlhtml for Excel.
you can download them on
http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/
Hope it may help

[Pete Randall]

Mark,

Years ago we tried SoftWindows from Insignia Solutions. It was functional but S.L.O.W. As Clay mentioned, at that time it was 3.1 emulation. Searches for Insignia Solutions don't seem to find anything. Searches for SoftWindows turn up FWB Software, LLC http://www.fwb.com, among others.

For the amount of effort involved, the functionality you'd achieve and the cost, I would have to say you'd be far better off throwing your 715's in the scrap heap and getting some cheap PC's. You can get a 1.8Ghz Dell for $659 nowadays - you're gettin' a Dell, dude ;^).

Good luck,
Pete

[Volker Borowski]

Hi,
It might be difficult to run/emulate a real M$-Word.
.. what about using a "compatible" program, that runs on HP-UX.

http://www.abiword.com

I saw a demo-version last year. Was impressing at first look, but we did not dig any further.

Hope this helps
Volker

[John Carr_2]

Hi

It can be done but at a cost !!!

build a NT server install Citrix Metaframe then install the client s/w on the workstation and run the MS apps on the server but from the 715.

It would be far cheaper to buy some new PC's

John.

[Mark Vollmers]

Wow- quite of lot to sift through. Thanks for all the ideas! I think that the win3.1 stuff probably won't work (or be feasable), cause of speed and issues about being outdated, not to mention finding it. Linux is still an option, but from what I've seen, it sounds like a lot of work to get everything compiled and working. I only need these documents to be read, so it looks like my choices are either to get something to convert them to another format (quickview plus, html format) or hop on another program to handle them (star office, abiword, or citrix). Looks like I've got some digging to do. Depending on how it goes, I might give most of it a quick try and see what I end up with. If I get any of it to work with any degree of satisfaction, I'll let you all know. Thanks so much for all the help!

Mark

(I'll hold off on points until I get stuff tried out, hopefully not too long)

[Mark Landin]

A Citrix Metaframe solution would most likely *not* be cheaper than PC's these days, especially if you have to build one from scratch (i.e., don't already have Metaframe running in your organization). In fact we just retired a 25-user Metaframe installation and replaced it with 25 PC's because the PC's ended up cheaper. Additionally, the Metaframe environment only had about 95% of the functionality that a standalone PC has.

It may be "cheapest" to just export the Word documents as HTML or as PDF. Then you can use native HP-UX application with no problem.

[Mark Vollmers]

Mark-

that's my thought (and probably preferred method, porting) but I'm curious now about the others as well, and who knows? it might be easier (or better) to run something else.

Mark

[Ryan Moore]

You could use VNC for this. Just put the vncserver on the windows machine and went you want to view the WORD docs from the UNIX machine, you can run vncviewer to the windows box.

Very light weight and free.

rhino

[Vincent Fleming]

Last I heard, there was a Linux port for PA-RISC out there. The office software on Linux is supposed to be able to read Word.

Of course, you could always just port the Linux office software to HP-UX.

Good luck!