VMware

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.

The error message during VMware setup (vmware-config.pl) is due to the fact that Suse 9 has a too new package for the requested library:

/usr/bin/vmware-smbpasswd.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpopt.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The following fixes the problem:

ln -s /usr/lib/libpopt.so.1 /usr/lib/libpopt.so.0