Not something I'm quite ready to do yet but been thinking about...

At the moment have a dual boot machine with XP on one and slackware 8.1 on the other..
I'm using the box to act as a gateway to a small home network, so need the linux part booted most of the time...

As a result I'm migrating all the stuff i use xp for to linux (DVDs, Word Processing, Music etc)

However I do play games quite a bit on XP and was wondering how easy it would be to play them through linux...

Have considered VMware... but don't wanna have to pay..
what's wine like these days.. last time I came across it, it was still quite basic....

Any other options?

wine is pretty poor still i think. winex is a specially hacked branch that is aimed at playing games, so you'll possibly have more luck with that. Now flogging a dead horse.. try going native... http://MPlayerhq.hu for playing dvd's, bloody brilliant. but as for word processing... i still don't think anythign can touch word, so some form of emulator would be handy for that i guess, I use VMware a lot, and it's superb, and very nearly as fast as a real windwos boot, and actually MORE stable imo. but word on wine is a waste of time really.

acid and his quest to find a good word processor for Linux..
hehe, as I tend to like Word on Windows (bout the only thing i ever use out of the Office suite if I do use it), I don't like emulators. acid doesn't much care for AbiWord but I don't have much problems with it. You could also go with OpenOffice possibly.

well if pushed i would have to recommend kword, and i hate kde nearly as much as windows..... Abiword is coming along though, i've not really tried it for a few months now, but i still think it'll be 6 months or so until it would acutally be a serious contender.

CrossOver Office runs Microsoft Office under Linux -> http://www.codeweavers.com/ , works fabulous with my Slack 8.1 install.

My 2p... depends what games you want to play. My personal experience would be to go with VMWare... I've had nothing but trouble from Wine (playing games, that is). Not tried WineX (yet), but I have heard of lots of good examples of it working well. However, some games that used to work under Dos, but then failed to work under W95/98/ME/NT/2000 do work under XP and won't work under Wine... but then, they do work under XP on VMWare.... a bit of a convoluted sentence, but I think you'll get the jist of it.

HTH.

Oh, and another thing... I like VMWare because I can now run XP on my 1.4G machine whereas I can't run it natively... not sure why, but I can't even shoe-horn it in natively, so VMWare has another string to its bow, as far as I'm concerned.

Good luck.

Only problem with VMware is the cost

For those who might have VMware running on Slack... were there any issues in getting it to work correctly?

I saw that they only support/tested on Mandrake, Redhat, Suse, and Caldrea.... so I'm thinking of giving it a try, but would just like a heads up on any problems I might run into.

-Thanks