by Scott H » Fri Oct 24, 2008 12:07 pm
It might, but until you try it you wont know for sure. The best way to insure WINE will work with most Windows aps is to use WINE to run the Application's setup program.
In extreme cases where WINE wont work, you can use Virtualbox (now owned by Sun) to install Windows as a guest OS with Linux as the host. This requires you to have an installable Windows. That is to say it cannot be a restore disk like gateway, dell, toshiba and HP are shipping with their computers, but a regular installable windows disk.
In essence you are creating a virtual drive on your hard drive that runs under Linux. So when you boot your virtual machine, you will see a window open up and watch Windows booting. It looks identical to windows booting as the main OS. The sick thing is -- windows will boot noticeably faster as a guest to Linux than it can booted natively on the very same computer as the main operating system. Once you have the guest OS installed, you can create file sharing so your Windows guest and the Linux host can share drives and files.
The only downside to VirtualBox is the need for physical ram on the motherboard to keep things running snappy. 1gb ram works well in most cases.
Scott