My wife and I are planning this year's landscaping projects for our new home (we bought it last August).  I thought a clever way to do that would be to run some landscaping software I bought a few years back.  It's a Windows 98 application.  I have a copy of Windows 98 that I bought to do a review of Win4Lin a few years back too.  So it seemed like it shouldn't be a big deal to get this working on my FC5 laptop.

The first thing I thought I'd try is to run Wine.  I've heard so much about how wonderful it is at running Windows applications.  I thought an old Win98 app should be no problem for it.  After running winecfg to configure my environment I tried to launch the setup.exe program from the application CDs.  No luck.  I just kept getting "internal error" message boxes from InstallShield.  I dug around on the net for awhile and stumbled across a vague reference to changing the default window size under winecfg.  So I tried that.  I made the virtual desktop 1024×768.  That made InstallShield happy and I started installing.

Unfortunately, the applications just kind of locked up when after installing.  I couldn't get anything to run.  It's possible there was more I could do, but my fast solution to this problem turned out to take longer than I wanted and since I had the Win98 install CD I decided to punt and go with the free vmware Server to run the OS.

So I downloaded VMWare and got it configured.  The first problem was the my Win98 CD was not bootable.  I had a floppy disk instead.  So I dd'd the floppy to an image:

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=win98install.img

I had to do that on an old machine since most of my newer boxes (including the laptop)  don't have floppies anymore.  So I copied the image to the laptop and told VMWare about it.  I then made sure the VMWare bios was configured to boot from floppy.  That got my Win98 install running.  But boy, VMWare is a pig when it does it's thing.  I get crappy response time on my other apps while it's running.  I don't have that much trouble running a mythtv client on my laptop while doing other work and it's running with software decoding.

Anyway, Win98 got installed after several hours and I managed to get the CDs of the landscaping software installed a while after that.  It all seems to run okay (the software is the Broderbund 3D Home Design Suite) but I need to run the video tutorials to learn how to use the software.  Problem is, VMWare isn't seeing my audio under linux.  So there is no audio under Win98.   Haven't solved that problem yet. 

But 6 hours was way longer than I wanted to spend on this.  It would be faster to just draw on graph paper.

update: 2007-03-19

According to VMWare, Win98 users needs to install a Creative Sound Blaster audio driver in order for sound to work, though I think the problem is worse than that since VMWare itself doesn't even see my audio system under Linux.   Worse, the driver didn't appear to install correctly.  This is starting to sound like a hopeless adventure.  I can't even save data to my local hard disk because the network doesn't appear to be working under Win98 either.  I also found reference to using the any-any update, but it says to do this before you run vmware-config.pl the first time so I don't know what will happen if I try it now, after I've already run vmware-config.pl.  Guess it couldn't get any worse to try it.

It looks like Win98 support is not very strong under VMWare, at least not on fedora.  I run WinXP at work without any trouble.  Too bad – I would have liked to have run this little landscape program ….