Can Wine make Windows Media Player run in Linux? If it could, that would remove one impediment to my abandoning Windows--I don't like any of the music players I have seen in Linux (Kaffeine, Amarok and one other common app whose name I don't recall). One of them, either Kaffeine or Amarok, tends to crash most of the time for me anyway. I don't like the overall Windows operating system any more than anyone else, but Windows Media Player just works; it does everything I want.

Have you tried VLC (Video Lan Client)? Available here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ It's skinnable (i've no doubt there will be a winblow$ media player skin available for it) and, it does far more than WMP and, best of all...It just works!

Okay, I'll look at it. Thank you. Is it called Video Lan because it's designed with videos in mind?

I don't know, perhaps that's a question for the developers

I've been using Amarok for over a year and I haven't had too many problems with it, as long as you use the XINE backend then it's fine, crashes less often than WMP did on my Windows box :-)

I have not run WINE for a long time, but when last I did it would play an old version of WMP but not the then-current version (release 8 IIRC).

As WINE becomes more and more complete in implementing the Windows API, you would certainly think it would play WMP. But I can't say for sure.

Try it and see, or visit winehq.com and see what they have to say about it.

edit: Actually, being curious, I did just that. According to this page, WMP 10 and 11 don't play though WMP 9 does play with some minor issues. I guess this isn't too surprising; WMP10 has a lot of that digital rights management junk in it and that (I think) would cause it to break in an environment where the real Windows kernel wasn't present.