Is there an app under Linux that can emulate the Windows 98 or 2000 environment (I want to run Office and play my games entirely in Linux)? Thanks.

There are projects underway who claim to run windows applications under linux. One of these is wine. Install wine on your linux machine and visit wine home page at www.winehq.com for details of support available.

For office use CodeWeavers CrossOver office. It runs MS Office apps pretty much fine (using a custom version of wine) as well as photoshop and a few other programs. If you want to run games, try winex. Again it's another custom version of wine (by transgaming) with directx support. Games which use opengl run great (especially if you have an nvidia card and the correct drivers) as the calls are passed directly to the graphics card. DirectX instructions are translated to opengl in software, so they run a little slower. The most annoying bit is actually trying to install the games and get them to run, often you have to try to get a cracked exe even if you have bought the original game!=o( Best of all is to try to find linux equivalents, open office etc and there are more and more linux binaries coming out that allow you to run windows games under linux....do some searching first before reorting to wine.

I have Crossover Office installed under Red Hat 9 Linux. It allows me to run Word 97 and Excel 97. It does an excellent job of running Word 97, Excel 97, Word 2000 and Excel 2000. Codeweavers makes Crossover Office and give it a slightly lower rating for how it runs the XP versions of Office. It also allows some versions of a few other Windows programs to run. It seems to do a perfect job of running Word 97 and Excel 97. Crossover Office costs about $60. I like it! If you can afford a more expensive product and also have an unused copy of Windows laying around VMware might be worth considering. One version of VMware allows the running of other operating systems within a window in Linux. Windows can be run in a window under Linux. In a college class that I was taking, we used a different version of VMware. We used Windows XP as the host operating system and as the guest operating systems we used both Red Hat 7.3 and Windows 2000. That combination was totally stable and worked well. Each OS also had its own useable IP address. I would prefer to have the one that uses Linux as the host. It is about $300 or if you have a student ID card the student version is about half that much. Keep in mind that I have never tried the version that uses Linux as the host. Not all versions of all distros are supported by VMware. Red Hat 7.3 and 8.0 are supported but Red Hat 9 is not yet supported. I would like to try using Windows NT 4.0 and DOS 6.22 as the guests.