WINE

I am using Textco's Gene Construction Kit (version 2.5) do draw my DNA vector maps. Unfortunately this company doesn't care about Linux users. Therefore I have to use WINE to run the Windows version of the program. Admittedly, I could run VMware, VirtualBox or Parallels, but all that just to run a small program? Unfortunately either the Gene Construction Kit (GCK) is not coded according to standards or WINE is still not able to deliver full compatibility but now and then a WINE upgrade renders the program unable to run.

There are only a few Mac or Windows programs that don't have a good equivalent on Linux. One of these few is the Gene Construction Kit (GCK) from Textco. GCK is available for both Windows and Mac. So it should be possible to run it on an i86-Linux machine using wine (a sort of emulator). I tried that and failed (I didn't try really hard). However, probably any Windows program can be run under Linux using VMware. Unfortunately VMware is commerical and expensive (but there is a fully functional time-limited demo).

Being fed up with VMware (because it's so slow and using half of my memory) I turned to Wine. But Wine appears to be very difficult to set up. Typical Linux. It will work but unless you spend a whole week you don't get it working. That's where the Corssover Office application comes in. It's just a bunch of helper applications to make setting up wine easy. That is with certain Windows applications and most Windows applications are not supported.