By the way, Crossover is great, but one has to pay for it. This is what I mean by "enslaving Windoze". I installed MS Office XP and it works. I just don't know how to open some things, and there is no automaticity to it.

Apparently the .bz2 means that it's the second download of Wine.

And how can I get a screensaver to "stick"? Or download and install a screensaver?

If you already have Crossover installed then you don't need Wine, or did you install the demo version?
bz2 extensions mean the program was compressed with bzip2. From the terminal type "bunzip2 path/to/file.bz2" Then you will still have to install the program, their should be a file named README, but it will probably say to become root and run './configure', then 'make'. and then 'make install'.

It's the demo version. Users of Linux are not supposed to spend money.

I'll try this out- just to show you how newbie I am, that's in the "Run Command", right?

Later- nope. I'm still clueless. Hope that doesn't make me a "noob" now .

tar jxf wine-0.9.18.tar.bz2

Sorry-

Still clueless.

I saw a book at Barnes and Noble today that was a very thick manual for Ubuntu, with an installation CD-ROM. But it was either $50 or $60- one of the two. So do we spend money on OS's with a pretty intuitive GUI, or do we spend money and/or time with a non-intuitive GUI? I have time right now, but I don't have money.

And I tried to copy and paste that command line in a couple of places but nothing happened.

Is there something like an .exe, .ini. or .bat? Or will I have to deal with the code, and if so, where?

open a terminal in the same folder as the archive and then execute that command, and no there are no exe's in nix; except the stuff you run in wine
and generaly speaking, if you attempt to execute a command in a term and it doesnt give any feedback, then usualy it means it worked. most commands only return if there is an error.

tar jxvf wine-0.9.18.tar.bz2

Instead of dealing with the code, you could just install some rpm or deb package for your distribution. I see you don't have enough experience with linux, so you'd better leave the code alone.

Thanks to all.

gikiaga, you're absolutely right. I don't want to do code at all. Heck, I'm so new I don't even know what it means to "open a terminal in the same folder as the archive and then execute that command". Did I mention I'm 54 and have been looking at Windows since 3.11?

Again, thanks to all. I would like to be able to run some kind of Linux just on principle, but I really need a good GUI.

If you follow the directons here http://winehq.org/site/download-deb it will show you how to add the wine repository to your sources, then you can download and install the latest version when it comes out.
There are 2 graphical package managers, synaptic and adept. Ubuntu uses adept, so if you start that and add the repository for your version, then you update (which downloads the list of available packages form each repository site) then you can install wine.

That page also has instructins for manually editing the sources.list file, but you can ignore that for now. If you need to open a terminal there should be an option in the menu for it, but it may be called 'console' I think if you enter 'xterm' in the run box it should open a basic terminal. There are lots of variations on the terminal each with different features added on.

You can also get to a terminal by pressing ctrl+alt+F1. F1 throu F6 are all all console windows, with Xwindows (which includes gnome or any graphical progam) running on F7. You can switch between them by holding down alt and the F-key you want to go to, except as noted to switch from the gui(F7) to comand line(F1-F6). Pressing alt-F7 will take you back to the gui.

Here's an introduction to some common methods:

linuxforums.org/forum/linux-tutorials-howtos-reference-material/9358-howto-install-software-readme.html

I'm sorry, but it's even more basic than that. I've gone to the link (thanks) and I'm going to read it, but it's really basic for me, like "click here, go to (X), choose this option", that kind of stuff.

I hope I don't get to be a "noob".

really? thats not what I've heard. Free as in freedom, not free lunch

I'm going to hope you're using gnome, if this doesn't make sense then you're probably not.

At the bottom or the top of the screen will be a thing that says "Applications". Click on that and a menu pops up (like the windows start menu). There are various other menus in there, I think in the system menu it will have something like "terminal" or "console". Click on that. A window will come up which you can type text into.

The next thing is where did you save the wine file to?

Sorry to be so dense, but I see something in SimplyMepis in the main menu called "Run Command". Would that be it?

If so, what command would I run to open the file I refer to?

And I know it would be too much for you to tell me what command I would run for each and every program I have, so can you point me to a tutorial that shows what commands need to be run for each program?

Obviously I'm working on a very basic level here.

Thanks.