We are often asked "Are you porting Igor to Linux"? The answer is
"no".

For the time being, we are focusing on improving the underlying
features of Igor for our Macintosh and Windows users.

Some Igor users report success running Igor under Linux Windows
emulators such as WINE, CrossOver
Office (a commercial version of WINE) and VMWare,
win4lin. The CrossOver web site
has an area that discusses user's experiences
running Igor Pro under Crossover Office.

At some point in the future, we may consider a port to Linux. If
you feel a Linux port should be moved to a higher priority, drop a
line to support@wavemetrics.com.

Here are some comments about Igor/Linux from the Igor Mailing List
and from email sent to WaveMetrics support in reverse chronological order:

I just wanted to mention that I've been running Igor 6 under linux
(Fedora Core 5) for about a week now, and it seems to generally be
working better than Igor 5 did (although there was very little to
complain about w/ Igor 5. The only (very slight) issue is that compared
to Igor 5, changing windows is slower. This of course is probably due
to the the fact that Igor has to go through Crossover office, then the
linux window manager (Gnome) in order to manipulate windows. That
aside, it's perfect.

I suppose I am not the first to tell you, but Igor works
wonderfully, although a little slow, in Linux running under WINE
emulation.Setup is a piece of cake. I am attaching a screenshot of
the famous Monster Graph demo taken on my Dell Inspiron 8000 running
Fedora Core 3. Everything I have tested works so far (aside from
hardware addressing of course).

I have been waiting for a Linux-native version for a while. I
figure that if there is the Carbon version for what is basically
unix, then it would not be too far off. But in the mean time I can
scratch this itch with emulation.

Couldn't be more thrilled. I have always said that the one thing
keeping me with Windows was Igor. Now I don't have even that
excuse.

I installed Igor 5.02 on my Fedora 3 machine, using Crossover
office. Igor 5.02 appears to work as well

as on Windows XP. It could make a good selling point. So far (I
have checked all the demos), I have not found any problems with
running Igor 5.02 under Fedora 3.

I thought you as a company may be interested in the fact that IGOR
Pro 5 sucessfully installs and runs under Linux using CodeWeavers
CrossOver Office 3.0 [1](in my case on the Debian Testing
distribution of GNU/Linux).

I've run Igor on WindowsNT4.0 on vmware 2 on RH Linux 7.2. No
problem.

I have run Igor 4 using win4lin 3.0 (by NeTraverse) and Win98 on a
linux mandrake box. I had no problems.

We've had some encouraging experience running IgorPro 4.01 on
WINE, on Debian. After a few stability problems, our Linux-guru
advised us to install Crossover to help configure Wine. Igor's been
running ok since then. We haven't been doing heavy-duty stuff,
though.

Just tried running Igor Pro 4.02A under Wine 20020804. The short
result: It WORKS! Yippee! No more vmware! We use SuSE Linux, 8.1 pro,
with the included wine.

The Igor installer setup.exe hangs wine. However, just copying the
Wavemetrics directory from Windows to Linux works fine, although i'm
now unregistered :-(, but everything works :-) Apparently Wavemetrics
does not even use the cursed Windows registry, which again shows the
greatness of this small company.

I'm still having problems with reloading old experiments, because
of complaints that it can't find font Arial, which i don't have on
this Linux box. Apart from that, everything loads fine.

Another problem is the graph cursors. If I click on one of those,
my Igor hangs, and I need to kill it.

Anyway, I'm extremely glad to get rid of using vmware, and
Windows.

I'm sorry to report that my experience was less satisfactory.

After some struggling, I was able to get SuSE Linux 8.1 Pro to run
on my eMachines T2200SE.

I did not try to install Igor but instead double-clicked the
Igor.exe file on the C partition which was mounted in the Linux file
hierarchy (Linux is on another partition). The WINE (Windows
emulator) installer launched and installed WINE. Then I ran Igor.

In about 1/2 hour of playing around, I encountered a lot of
problems. Here are some that I can remember:

Non-fatal errors caused by absence of Arial font.

Scrolling in page layouts and tables left a lot of screen garbage
around.

Copy/paste into notebook did not work at all. Nothing was
pasted.

The tabs in the Add Annotation dialog were completely garbled so
the dialog was unusable.

My impression was that, although about 95% of Igor worked, the
other 5% was a major annoyance if not a show-stopper.

Some of the graphics-oriented problems may be caused by the fact
that SuSE Linux does not support the graphics card in my machine so
it was configured as a generic card.

It seems I was a bit premature :-( I just went hyper when the
experiment graphs that I was working on appeared on my Wine/Igor
hybrid. I did some experimenting this morning, and found most of the
problems Howard found.