News

Mainsoft Enables Windows NT Apps to Run on Linux

• By Scott Bekker
• 10/19/1999

Mainsoft Corp. (www.mainsoft.com) announced that it is developing a version of its MainWin software for the Linux operating system. MainWin is Mainsoft's Windows platform for Unix environments, allowing software developers to rehost Windows NT applications on Unix systems using a single source code for both Windows and Unix systems. MainWin for Linux will initially focus on the Red Hat release of Linux, with other versions likely to follow.

MainWin puts the Win32 on Unix and supports a full range of the Win32 API. This is made possible because of an agreement with Microsoft in which Mainsoft received and incorporated several million lines of original Windows NT source code into MainWin. This ensures that applications developed in C or C++ for Windows will run on Unix as they do on Windows NT.

The release of MainWin for Linux is a boon to the Linux community. "The most popular applications, development environment, middleware, and serverware software has not been available on Linux," says Dan Kusnetzky, program director of Operating Environments and Serverware Services at International Data Corp. (IDC, www.idc.com). "The absence of this software has slowed the adoption of Linux both as a client and as a server operating environment. Solutions making it possible to rehost this software without requiring extensive retraining of developers or expensive and time consuming rewrites is an important step towards considering Linux as a mainstream commercial operating environment."

Some of the applications that will be able to be rehosted to Unix with MainWin include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, Computer Associates' Unicenter, and Alcatel's X-Vision Enterprise. MainWin for Linux will be available in demo versions in the coming weeks at Mainsoft's Web site, and the commercial release will be available from Mainsoft in the first quarter of 2000.