How do i open a microsoft office access database in linux, what programs do i need to get?

I'm running Fedora Core 4

Hmm. OpenOffice.org might be able to read .mdb files. See here.

There is also Kexi, part of KOffice 1.4. See here.

These projects seem to be in a beta stage, though.

knoda is a database frontend for KDE.
Its driver concept allows a uniform connection to different database servers (Dbase/Xbase, Firebird, MS Access/Mdbtools, Mysql , Paradox, Postgresql, SQLite or ODBC). http://www.knoda.org/

Will OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta which comes with fedora core 4 work with that or does it have to be the latest stable version?

====== Does anyone know how to create Microsoft Office Access Databases OR Other alternative databases which allow similar capabilities and ease of use? =========

Unless otherwise stated, I'd go with the premise that it would work with 2.0 too. I doubt that they would remove the ability or "break" it for no reason.

I work with SQL. Unless you elaborate on what it is you want to do with MS Access of MySQL I couldn't answer your question at the end.

Ginetta

I mean like use forms to enter data and go through the data, like a gui for the database, macros, reports, the stuff you can do in Microsoft Access.

How do you create a MySQL database, is it a program like microsoft access where you have tables with information in it and you add the information you want? Can you link the tables, define primary keys, run a query which will access multiple tables, can you search it, then create a report from that query, create a form which ou can use to go through that data.

You can think of Open Office as an interface to any number of database types. Using it's spreadsheet application you can directly connect to mysql and manipulate tables and so on.
Also you can use phpMyAdmin which is a browser interface using php (hense the name) run through a web server to do the same administrative actions.
There are probably a number of other open source initiatives available to run similar tasks.
An Access fan might find any number of reasons not to use anything but Access so my advise is if you are interested in other database servers mysql is a good place to start and not that hard to transition over from Access. Heck if I can do it anyone can.

G.

While MySQL is absolutely a good database for a business/personal use (website, etc) it is in no way comparable to MS Access in terms of end-user ease of use. People may argue with me on this one, but think about it...Access lets you draw little lines between tables to represent table joins, and build your queries by selecting fields from drop-down menus. Give me a break, you don't even need to know what "SQL" means to use it. There are absolutely exceptions to this, people who are good with Access will p'bly be good with any database, but I think my point stands.
There are a few GUIs out there that you can use. The one we use at work is the browser-only interface of PhpMyAdmin, which is "eh, ok I guess", but mysql's native interface is commandline-only, and I vastly prefer that. It's faster and straightfoward, and not as slow as a web interface inevitably is. Search google for "MySQL GUI", though, and you can look thru the results to see if anything suits you.

It is a RDBMS, but It is *not* Access. Access is a database with a really good, user-level frontend. MySQL is simply a database: it holds data, and you can query it via a SQL query to get at what you want. Perl's got a good DBI module that interfaces really easily with MySQL (hence the frequent website usage).
Access is still one of the not-quite-reproducable parts of Office, and one of the things that Microsoft got very, very right

So,
How do you create a database? For example,
"CREATE TABLE tablename(
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
PRIMARY KEY(id),
name VARCHAR(30),
age INT)" will give you a table named "tablename" with a field "id" as an auto-incrementing primary key, a field "name" which is a character field of length 30, and a field "age" which holds an integer.
Can you link the tables? Yes - look up the SQL "join" command, or look into subselects.
define primary keys? Yes
run a query which will access multiple tables? Yes, see question 1
can you search it? Yes, that's what SQL was written to do
then create a report from that query? Yes - pretty sure you can export your query to a .csv file, and then pull that into any Excel-like app (i.e. OpenOffice). Although if OO works like ginetta says it does, you could just directly connect and not need to do the export.
create a form which you can use to go through that data? Yep, see previous answer.