Running the Windows OpenBabel GUI under Linux on the Windows desktop - Need some Wine?

A friend of mine (Ed Cannon) recently showed me the OpenBabel GUI running on Linux. The surprising thing about this is that OpenBabel currently does not have a Linux version of the GUI (Update 16/Sept/09: Now it does). He was running our Windows release on Linux using Wine, the Windows emulator ("sudo apt-get install wine"). Cool, I thought - I didn't realise that that would even work. Cue blog post.

To get a screenshot I needed Linux. As I described earlier, it's easy (and free) to run Linux on Windows using VMWare Player. This time I installed an Ubuntu 9.04 image. And then (after running "sudo vmware-config-tools.pl") I discovered a new feature called Unity mode. This allows you to use the virtual machine to start Linux applications that appear directly on your Windows desktop (rather than enclosed in a Linux desktop). So I decided to get a screenshot of the Windows OpenBabel GUI running under Wine/Linux together with it running natively on Windows.

The only catch is that I wasn't able to screen capture the Linux application in Windows so in the end, despite all my hard work, I had to Gimp two images together. The resulting image is accurate though, and you can click for a larger version.

Use Linux on Windows (for free!)

My Dell laptop runs WinXP, but I find it useful to have access to Linux. Here are the steps you need to take to run a Linux distribution from Windows using VMWare, who provide VMWare Player (and also VMWare Server) for free.

I find this method of accessing Linux useful:
(1) because I need to develop software on Linux and Windows
(2) it's nicer than Putty if you need to 'ssh' somewhere
(3) you don't need to reboot your computer to use Linux
(4) you can close the virtual machine and it starts up at the same point next time
(5) if you use VMWare Server, you can take snapshots of your entire operating system and state, which you can continue from later or give to other people
(6) no need to install Linux yourself or repartition your hard drive
(7) security -- let the hackers hack your virtual machine rather than your desktop PC
(8) you can test webservices, as the virtual machine behaves like a completely different PC

It's pretty easy to setup:
(1) Download and install VMWare Player from the link above
(2) Download a virtual machine containing a Linux distribution from the VMWare site (for example). I downloaded a virtual machine of Debian Etch. What's good about Debian is that it's stable, and has a really nice package installation system containing 19000 packages.
(3) Start the virtual machine by opening in VMWare Player, and sit back while it boots up.
(4) The one difficulty with VMWare is getting the networking to work. As described on the home page for this virtual machine, you need to start the VMWare network driver by entering the following as root (the passwords for 'user' and 'root' and simply 'user' and 'root'):

/etc/init.d/networking stop
rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
depmod -a
modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/networking start

If it worked, the output of '/sbin/ifconfig' should show eth0 as a network driver, and it should be possible to access the internet, and 'ssh' out of the machine.
(5) At this point, you can start installing whatever packages you want, by clicking on "Desktop", "Administration", "Synaptic Package Manager" (or use the command-line interface, 'apt-get install whatever')

Here's the obligatory screenshot showing me writing this blog post on Windows, and running VMWare/Debian at the same time. I've just installed and run GaussSum at the command line: