Ask About Running Windows Software in Linux

There have been recent reports about programs from Israel, Canada, and The Philippines that let you run Windows software in Linux. Are they really new? Can they succeed? Is this whole effort worth the time and trouble going into it? CodeWeavers CEO and Wine maven Jeremy White ought to know, since he's been working to bring Windows software to Linux users for many years -- with quite a bit of success. We'll forward 10 - 12 of the highest moderated questions posted here to Jeremy, and run his answers as soon as we get them back.

Comments

Conspiracy

[sameerdesai]

This is a conspiracy by Windows and SCO to ruin Linux!!!

Re:Is Windows binary compatibility a good thing?

[amber_of_luxor]

tried using it recently for a report, and it can't even properly do things as basic as page numbering and footers.

That sounds about like the functional ability of ms office. Oh wait, you were describing OOo. OOo 1.1 can do things that cause msofficeXp to choke up and die. [Actually, XP itself gets the blue screen of death.]

The "problems" you describe sound like stylesheets were not being used correctly. OOo requires stylesheets to be used for everything. MSOffice has yet to learn what a style sheet is, much less how they are used.

revision control features, security features, and other stuff that is totally missing from OpenOffice.

Revision control is in OOo. DRM is not in OOo. If you need encrypted files, GUPGP and a macro make OOo documents secure. There are a couple of one key mactos that encrypt and save a file in OOo.

The database in OOo sucks, but MySQL installation is relatively straightforward. msoffice does have slightly faster CJKV text input, than OOo has.]

If you think OpenOffice can completely replace MS Office, you don't know anything about MS Office.

Which explains why msoffice blows up, and my computer has the blue screen of death, when I write my book. The same text, in OOo causes no problems.

I can write one page of text in OOo in five minutes. The same page, using ms office, takes three hours if msoffice doesn't crash, winxp doesn't give me the blue screen of death.

Amber