_________SWAT MAGAZINE ISSUE TWENTY FOUR: DECEMBER 1999_________
  /         \___________________________________________/          \
 /	  The Beginners Guide To Windows-Linux Compatibility.       \
/                         by =The-Doh-Boy=                           \
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A major problem facing most Linux newbies is that they have problems 
running their old Windows apps, and working out how to use zip files 
etc. Well worry no more because Uncle DohBoy is here to help.

Using Wine.

If your Linux distro is RPM compatible get the Wine RPM from 
www.wine.org steer clear of the source, it takes something like 1GB to 
compile.
Once you get it installed, edit the file called /etc/wine/wine.conf or 
/etc/wine.conf on some older releases. If you have a DOS partition 
mounted {in /dos say} then point wine in the direction for your 
C:\windows directory {the docs in the file are pretty good} If you only
have Linux on your hard drive {good for you} then make a directory
called /windows and then /windows/system and use these as your windows 
folders in ths set up file.
Once you haue this set up then you can run a windows binary by typing: 
wine /yourdospartition/folder/program.exe
You can now run a lot of usefull Windows progrms which you might miss 
like Winzip, I use the 16 bit version because it is the more stable 
when being emulated.

Alternatiues.

The major alternatiue to wine is WABI which is a commercial application
marketed by Caldera. It requires a copy of Windows and so is less 
desirable than wine.

Virtual Machines.

There are a number of virtual machines out there which allow you to 
run other operating systems "in" Linux. Two of these which I use are 
BOCHS and VMWare. BOCHS is shareware, must be compiled from source, 
and hence runs on a lot of platforms. The only major problem is that 
all emulation is in software and so is rather slow. Check out 
www.bochs.com VMWare comes in time limited format free with SUSE. It 
is quite heavy on resources but does run faster than BOCHS you can 
find it at www.vmware.com

The Importance Of FSTAB.

On most setups floppies are formatted in ext2 format. This is obviously
no good for sharing with windows users.  So what you have to do is edit
your /etc/fstab file to change the line with /dev/fd0  to the 
following.
/floppymountpoint /floppydevice msdos *rather than ext2* 0 0
this should allow you to mount msdos floppies easily.
Hopefully now you should have all your important apps working properly 
under Linux. And all your files should be saved in a dos readable 
format. Now you can use Linux with the safety blanket of your Windows 
environment..