I ve heard so so much bout wine and winex but ive absolutely no idea how to install and use them. And i dun understand the instructions on the web site. Could any one help me?

I keep seeing your posts on various problems and can't help thinking that RedHat may not be the best distro for you to be using. While RedHat and Fedora are Fine Distros for a business oriented or a Linux only environment, my experience is that they don't coexist well with Window$ and I don't think that they are the best 'Desktop' Linux. Additionally, I ran into real problems with the RH/fedora partitioning utility. You might be happier and learn more with another distro (I did). I'd suggest Mepis (my favorite) which is easy to configure, will pretty much recognize all your hardware, and has wine included. A lot of the other apps are readily available through the Debian repositories.

If you decide to go that way, download the 2003.10.01 & 2003.10.02 iso. 'Don't' go for the new 2004.05 beta as that's still pretty raw.

Mirrors are at:

Free Download Mirrors

You can download MEPIS for free from the following mirror sites. Usually the mirrors are a week or two behind the MEPIS download site. gatech is usually the fastest us mirror.

North American Mirrors

ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/mepis
ftp://ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mepis
http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/mepis/

European Mirrors

ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/mepis/
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/mepis/
ftp://flo-jlg.no-ip.org (user:mepisfr pwd:mepisfr)
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/distributions/mepis

It all depends on what type apps you are wanting to run. Regular wine will come standard with most distros. My experience has been that it will run limited Windows applications, and very few of them well. For office apps CrossoverOffice is definitely the way to go, but it isn't free. It will run a lot of Windows office apps extremely well, check this page out for a list of which ones. For gaming you'll want to go to Transgaming.org and subscribe to Winex3. It also cost a minimal amount monthly, but there is a free version you can download which is a lot harder to get up and running. If you need a variety of Windows programs, I've found Win4lin to be a stellar way to go! With Win4lin, you install non-XP type Windows right on top of you Linux, and it will run most programs excepting games as well, and more stable than Windows! It also installs effortlessly, but you must have a licensed copy of Windows to install.

To run apps with wine(x), cd to directory containing the desired executable and go:

wine windowsapp.exe

For winex go:

winex3 windowsapp.exe

Good Luck!

DapperDan is right on the money on this. Wine takes some getting used to. Crossover is very good and easy to run, out of the box. I have it on my systems and it runs Microsoft Office 2000 very well. Macromedia MX will also work. Of course, it is not free.

If you want to play with "free" Wine, then I found the following site, which is very helpful to get an idea of how it all works. Frank's Corner also gives you a good idea of what apps. may work and which will take some work to get going;

http://frankscorner.org/

howdy,

I can pretty much subscribe to the aforementioned. Wine's a nice thing, but it also has it's limits. I played around with it on 3 machines and found a few issues ...

a: Performance
Win-apps in a wine-environment do run, but don't expect a performance that would justify any production means. Running word/excel etc. may be ok, but the real biggies like PhotoShop or FlashMX (tested with PShop5.5, FlashMX) "sprinkle" along like frozen honey.

b: Display issues
On 2 machines the apps didn't show their toolbar icons. Whereas this is maybe bearable for something like Editplus, it is to be considered a major drawback for apps like FlashMX.

c: Stability issues
(I'd like to add at this point that I most probably didn't take the time to tweak Wine to utmost stability, so the encountered issues might have been easily my fault

One machine did't like Wine at all. Every launched app crashed either immediately or when some action was performed in the Win-app. The other machines showed more respect and ran the apps at least for some time. But crashes were a very popular phenomenon during the tests (info/tested apps: Ediplus, Source-Insight, PhotoShop, FlashMX, MS-Office-apps and the Windows 2000 pro board-tools like Explorer, CharMap, Calc etc. the latter ones ran somewhat fine).

I really don't want an impression to come along that I like to bash Wine - not at all! In fact, I do applaud the efforts of the dev-crew and I'm sure the product is on the right track.

But as we were searching for a royally stable crossover-solution for our production-departments we had to divert from it and instead we purchased VMWare4. That's a completeley different thing, but at that, a wonderful one! Drawback is that VMWare is not the cheapest software to add to your portfolio, but in the last 2 weeks it has proven worth every single cent.

cu

I'm currently using rh 9 now and i wld like to trey out winex but i read somewhere that winex does not work with the red hat kernel. Is it true?

I have run all the above mentioned Wines on RH 8, 9, and Fedora Core 1 without difficulties. I haven't tried wine with the 2.6 kernel though.

I presently play the games Trespasser, Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Team Fortress, all at native or better speeds. In fact, while playing the on-line multi-player Team Fortress, I get far better pings than I ever got under Windows!

If you must run Windows apps, VMware and Win4lin are both excellent solutions, although VMware is slower and more expensive, and Win4lin is less expensive and natively fast after it gets up and running. The limitation of Win4lin is that it only works with Windows before Windows2000.

For many of the Windows applications, there is usually a Linux equivalent. Of the ones I've tried, It's been my experience that the Linux equivalent is either as good and often better. For instance, why run Nero with wine when there's K3B? Why run Word 2000 with wine when there's Open Office? Why run MS Paint with wine when there's the Gimp and a whole host of other Linux "paint" programs? There are some that aren't as fully featured though. The interface of a native Linux app may at first be unfamiliar, but after a period of adjustment, it will almost invariably run more stably than it's Windows equivalent under the Windows OS.

We have to remember that these programs were made for Windows, not Linux, and our mileage using Wine is going to vary. Wine is not a magic program to run all Windows applications satisfactorily, but if you can get it to work for a particular program you cannot do without, it can be very handy.

We tried running Quickbooks Pro with regular Wine, Crossover Wine and even gave it a shot with Winex, all to dissatisfaction. Finally we found that Win4Lin runs Quickbooks Pro as well for us as it did under Windows. There are Linux financial programs out there, but most are not as full featured as Quickbooks, and very few will do payroll. For all other applications we use Linux.

Is there any linux equivalent for MS Publisher? My sister requires it urgently and i can't find anything.

You may want to take a look at Scribus.

http://www.scribus.net/