-Which one is better to use Wine or Cross Over, I want to run IE, MS Office00 and probably some games (Half-Life) -When I run any of Windows programs in Wine or Cross Over, would these program create the same security holes found in Windows, or is that different on Linux. Thanks

Use cross-over. MS Office will work very well under that. Can't speak for the games. IE will work too, but why would you want that? It doesn't have anywhere near the features offered by Mozilla, which comes with every Linux distro I know of. Wine is pretty spotty. It's been in alpha for years, and will work with some simple windows programs. I haven't been able to make MSOffice work with it. ....and while you're using MS Office under Cross-Over, give OpenOffice a try. I've replaced MS Office with it because not only is it free, it runs natively on Linux and Windows. You'll be able to use all of your MS documents with it too.

I agree, unless there is some windows program that you must have, use the linux equivliant. They are similar enough that the learning curve is really short. Esp with Open Office and Mozilla or Netscape. The security holes prolly will not happen. They are holes that allow access to the os, rpc's and such. I wouldn't think the virus or attack would look for, or find them on a hybrid system.

CrossOver exists because Wine is not dedicated to specific killer-apps, like MS Office, for which there is large demand.

For games use winex (like crossover it's another version of wine which is specifically aimed at running certain types of windoze apps) from www.transgaming.com There is a slim possibility of contracting some windoze viruses depending on what they exploit, eg running outlook with scripting enabled, but you are more likely just to spread the virus rather than damage your system (unless you keep logging on as root - a very bad practice). I am unaware of a "wine-aware" virus...then again there's always a first!

I am using CrossOver Office. It takes quite a while to load, in fact you think the system has gone to sleep but once loaded it runs superbly!. I too prefer to use Open Office 1.1, it is a vast improvement on Open Office 1.0 and in my opinion better than MS Word. I have found a few minor inconsistencies between MS Word (which our company uses) and Open Office but LESS than the problems we get from documents received from other countries running their own native language O/S and MS Windows or between MS Word 97/2000 and XP. If you have run Star Office 6 or Open Office 1.0 before you really deserve to give the new Open Office 1.1 a try, it is a great improvement and I like it more than my purchased version of Star Office 6. I also run Photoshop 7 and Adobe PageMaker 7 under Linux but as yet have not been able to get Visio to load, maybe my version has a bug or a bad file that does not cause a problem with Windows??. I agree with previous comment, Linux browsers are much faster than Microsoft's IE, especially Mozilla but Konquerer is sometimes more friendly on some sites, I use both extensively and try to avoid MS applications if possible. Hope this helps, CrossOver Office was worth the investment. You can download a fully functional trial version from their site, not crippled in anyway and use for a month but don't think it will take you a month before you purchase. P.S. I tried other solutions such as VM ware but it eats huge resources and slows the machine down even with 512Mb RAM. Cheers

dude, firebird. faster than native ie even on windows. is it correct to say that crossover office is a superset of wine? does crossover office sync up with the latest changes available from cvs for wine?