I'll have a bit of Wine with my Linux , please.

The living room computer is a Linux machine. It works well , it doesn't catch virii or trojens, it's very low maintenance. Doesn't run windows programs at all , which I don't miss. Except for games. Which I do miss.

How can you miss microsofts 600$ office suite when Linux gives you a free one that does all the basic tasks. True , it's not too hot onthe advanced stuff, but for just basic pounding out memo's and working on your novel and a simple address book it's great. And the spreadsheet is far more capable than most people suspect. Well..most spread sheets are, most people only know the command to add up a column of figures and don't really know it can do more than that.

My sister has some kind of custom program that needs windows xp , and I know Wine will run xp programs, I've read about it , so I installed Wine on my computer today.

Wine is a Linux "Emulator", that is to say , it lies to the program thats running and says "You're on a windows machine ! Trust me ! Would I lie to you ?"

Locate an old game cd...hmmm... Warcraft II , BNE (battle net edition). Throw the cd in. Use the Winebrowser to find the setup program on the disk (called, creatively enough, setup.exe) double click on it.

The screen flickers. The speakers blast game music. The standard windows install screen apears before me. Wow. Press install. And it goes through it , thinking it's on a windows machine and it's happy as a clam.

Acid test time. Do you want to start Warcraft ? You bet your Bill Gates Stocks I do ! Click yes, and teh screen goes dark. The intro movie plays. Ok, the movie player doesn't know its under Linux thats nice. The screen goes dark. The game music plays. The screen stays dark.

I begin to swear.

Then the screen lights up. The beginning screen of the game. There it is ... it was just a little slow. Emulators are notorious for that , I should have more patience. Start a game. Pick human side. Play the game all the way through , and save it , and close the program gracefully.

Wow , did I used to be addicted to this ? How many years ago ?

It ran without problems.

I was unable to make a short cut on the linux desk top to just click and start, but you can use the winebrowser to find the start program and play it that way, tried it and it started up again.

Conclusions :

I can run windows programs under linux. The average user cannot. There is no ease of use. Not until I figure out how to get linux short cuts going. If I can do that and render it to the point where a user can just click and the program goes, then it's for the average user. Otherwise, some technical ability (the ability to browse to the directory and find the start program for that application ) is required.