Hi

My computer has recently broken down and I lost windows XP so I switched to ubuntu 9.10. It’s just all my games and educational programmes no longer work.
I have heard about this virtual box thing I can use to run these programmes but I don't think this is the solution because I have tried to run programs meant for Linux but it just opens an achieve manager which I don’t know how to use. Is there a simple auto run programme or something that could solve my problem?

Some Windows programs might run under wine: some will, some won't and games are amongst the things that are least likely to work as games programmers often write as directly as they can to bare metal to speed things up.

The archive manager probably opened because you were trying to do something with a compressed file, which is effectively an archive (with either one file or many files in the archive); if you knew how to use it, it might allow you to de-compress the files, but that's no guarantee they would run.

To install programs that will work, you want the package manager. You should open up, eg, synaptic, tick on the programs that you want and it will grab them and install them for you. Try that with wine and then try some of your existing programs and see if you have any success, but if you can find native Linux programs that do want you want, you'll probably be happier.

Notes:

• there is more than just synaptic and they may be described as 'add and remove software', but that's a good place to start.
• at some point you will find that you want programs that don't seem to be available; for that you may need to enable extra repositories (stores of programs); search on "adding extra Ubuntu repositories " for more info when you get there

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You could use a program called wine which may already be installed. Check your /home/username directory (substitute your user name here) and click on View tab and select show hidden files. If there is a directory named "wine" you just need to configure it. You can probably find a link here at LQ on how to or go to winehq website or just google it.

What does 'broken' in reference to your windows partition mean? Are you unable to boot it? Can you see the files from Ubuntu?

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You seem to discuss two problems. One is that your games and educational programs don't work in Ubuntu 9. The other is that programs in Ubuntu are opening an "achieve manager". You meant archive manager, right?

For the games and educational programs, those did not run on Linux before, right? They are Windows programs. Since you lost your Windows installation, I am guessing that you have the programs on cd and are running them from cd. You would need a Windows emulator to run them, or you would need to run vmware or something like that. See if others have ran your games and educational programs with wine.

You can install wine if it is not already on your system. Use the software management tool for Ubuntu and try one of the repositories for Ubuntu. Synaptic Package Manager is one such tool.

For the Linux programs, what programs are you running, and are they already installed on your system? If you have a Linux program that you downloaded then it is usually in source code form and you need to unpack it and compile it. Then you can install it and run it after that. Try a repository to see if someone has pre-built it already.

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Ideally you should visit the WINE site and add their repository which contains the latest version. After you have installed WINE, you can try right-clicking on a Windows program and select 'open with' and WINE should be there, in the list of other programs, and you can set it as default.

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which games/programs did you use on Windows?

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Thanks heaps guys, I think I just about have it all fixed up.
To put it simply Yancek, My power supply exploded and two hard drives could not be saved. I had to rebuild the machine.