I have a couple of windoze programs that are stopping me from going 100% to Linux. I downloaded wine and installed it - I ran it - realised that didn't know what I was doing - downloaded and printed almost the entire wine instructions - Huh??

There doesn't seem to be a page that tells you how to actually install (and use) a windoze program in wine.

Lots and lots of instructions for configurations and more configurations, but no simple 'how to use wine for people called muzza'!

I've heard that Crossover Office is easier for commandlinephobes.

I've searched the websites for both Wine and Crossover Office to find which Windoze progs will run on each program. Wine's list is much longer. There are thousands of programs listed on the Crossover Office site, but most of them are marked 'untested'

I thought Crossover Office was basically a gui for wine? If a program works in Wine, surely it will work in crossoveroffice?

An example would be Powertabs v1.7

Anyone?

To install a program - put the CD in your CD drive and run
wine d:\setup.exe
from the command line.

If it's a program you've downloaded from the net, then copy it into your fake_c drive (normally kept under .wine) and then run
wine c:\setup.exe

As an aside, I found installing and using winetools (google to find it) to be really helpful. It gave a nice way to setup wine and install a bunch of software (like dcom, Internet Explorer, VB6 runtimes) etc.

Daniel

Now correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I know it is like this:

wine is open source, no gui. Not so easy to install and use, needs a little skill to get it working. It is free. It is done by the nice and powerful people of the community.
Crossover office is closed source, based on wine, basically the same as wine, but with a nice "click click click" gui that is very easy for everybody. All the changes (and advancements) from cross over office are put back into wine (which is only fair, since they build it on it). It is not free, costs around 50$ or something. It is done by a company called codeweavers http://www.codeweavers.com

Anything you can do with crossover office should basically also be in wine, but as said before, wine can be a pain to configure, especially for newbies.
But as I always say: either you got it in the head or you got it in the wallet. ;-)

cheers

Markus

wine configuration is very very easy,
it has a already a config script.
I use wine for windoz apps and cedega for games.(which is also wine based)