>>>Actually, there is a Windows Emulation program, WINE, available for Intel Linux/Unix X-Windows which will allow you to run a variety of MS Windows and DOS programs. According to its documentation at http://www.winehq.com/about.html, it supports DOS, Win 3.x and Win32 binaries. It is also working on OLE and COM support. Go check out the web page and judge for yourself.
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>>The last time I used it (about 15 or 16 months ago) the limit of WINE support for Win32 was WIN32s, a very incomplete implementation at best. There are a number of APIs that are not supported under WINE AFAIK, and there's very significant overhead to using it, both in terms of memory and execution speed.
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>Ed,
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>15 months is a LONG time for an Open Source product with over !40 developers contributing to it!

Well, the OS/2 Warp people have more resources available, and I have a really good idea of how unsuccessful they've been with putting out a Win32 emulator, and that with Big Blue behind the effort for several years before throwing in the towel. And they started a lot closer than Linux did.

I can guarentee you that if Linux could run Office and the like reliably and quickly, we'd be hearing a tremendous amount from the Linux community about it - look at how loudly they bitch when NT beats the crap out of them running benchmarks! (take a look at ZDNN from yesteray to see exactly what I mean...)