OK, I have been fiddling around with WINE for a little bit, and I think I must be missing the point. I was under the impression that you could install applications using it, and that its barebones installation would at least allow that. But, is that not the case? I just about crashed the box trying to open a simple exe (not an installer or anything), and I am beginning to wonder about this. I went to www.winehq.com, and it led me to another site with the rpms for it, and I picked up winesetuptk and followed the directions for use over at:

http://digilander.libero.it/winehqitalia/

So, am I missing something? Should I be dual booting and installing all this crap on a Windows partition and then mounting that in Linux? I was under the impression I could simply run "winelauncher /mnt/cdrom/setup.exe" but that doesn't seem to be the case, as it crashes out (at best) and locks up the system (at worst).

OK, well I just managed to install NewsBin Pro on my Linux box, and while the install went smoothly (very smoothly) the fonts were all screwed up (surprise) and some of the items couldn't be selected with a mouse properly in order to launch. But, at least I got WINE to do something, so that's a start, right?

Winelauncher?

Shouldn't "wine setup.exe" suffice?

Wine is developed in the hope that one day, if you have a friend that asks you "I whant to try linux, but can I use my olde programs on it?" you can answer "Yes!"; to know what apps run on wine, you can visit appdb.winehq.com
on the wine cvs server you will find "Wine is alpha software, and is not indicated for general use",
if it works for your software great, but if it dosen't you can just report a bug to bugs.winehq.com or just wait for a newer version that will run your app, if you have any problems with wine you can post a help mail on the wine newsgroup
comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine
and you will probably know in a few hours if you can run your app or if you have to wait for a newer version of wine. By the way you don't need windows to use wine, and you don't need a windows partition or any m$ files to run windows programs in wine.
Ivan Leo the webmaster of digilander.libero.it/winehqitalia