Ubuntu, Wine, and running Windows apps to get past the gatekeepers

I've had it with windows 7 64 bit. I beta tested the 32 bit for a very long time and it worked great for all the company apps. So I bought a new laptop and it came with windows 7.... 64 bit... The version that microsoft wants everyone to use. WEll it's also incompatible with 90% of the drivers for older hardware, and 100% incompatible with most of the software that businesses use.. Biamp Nexia and audia work most of the time... Crestron apps are 80% stable... a major fight with any of the DSP programming apps... I'm done. Windows and it's being a virus magnet and the instability of the OS along with the lack of apps for a developer to use easily (and for free) has finally pushed me to explore running linux and wine to get all my work done.

AS you can see by the image, I have IE6 running under wine. Something the Windows fan-bois at slashdot say is impossible. They typically know nothing about linux. And in fact the latest Ubuntu + Wine is brain dead easy to do this and install windows apps. you right click on the windows installer and select "run with wine" and the installer starts. It even ends up in your programs directory.

Outlook is a problem. Outlook 2000 is funky. and I have yet to find my office 2003 cd to try outlook 2003. I can always use the OWA web outlook interface...

So starts my saga to run windows business apps under linux that interface to hardware....