Hi,

My fiancee's boss has been having a lot of trouble with Windows lately, so they are seriously looking at switching all the desktops to Linux. However, they rely very heavily on a Windows application (Costsmaster), which uses automation to control MS Word.

CostsMaster have no plans for a Linux version. So, we're looking at the possibility of using Wine to run CostsMaster & Word on a Linux box, and using OOo for general office work. Does anyone know if this is likely to work? Does Wine support automation? And is CrossOverOffice likely to work better?

The other question is, if we install a Windows partition and install CostsMaster & Word onto it, will it suffer from the Windows instability problems when it's running under Linux/Wine? Or will Linux/Wine shield it from all the crap that causes so many problems under Windows?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Russ

A buddy of mine installed Crossover Office on his stinkpad a few months ago so that he can run MS Office 2k and has had no troubles at all. He travels a lot and this is his first season with a Linux-only setup (used to have a dual-boot).

If the company you're talking about already has valid licences for MS office then you should give crossover a try. One word of caution - we couldn't install it with his Upgrade edition. Had to get the full version.

As for stability - runs like a charm. Although Internet Exploder can be crashed easily enough, at least it doesn't take the entire system down with it.

They have Word & Works on most of the machines, with Office on one or two. Most of them only need Word, so that's no problem. They'd be happy to use OpenOffice.org for anything else (especially since it's a damn sight better than Works)

Thanks for your comments The main things I was concerned about were stability (sounds like that won't be a problem) and Word automation. Anyone know if it's possible to control Word from an external (Windows) program when running under Wine?

Russ