I promised that I'd post some results about my escapades in using Windows apps on Suse v9. But first, a few observations, all just my own personal feelings and findings. Nothing scientific at all, just backed by years of using Windows apps and a few years of Linux/Unix (Berkeley) stuff. When I rebuild my Windows laptop, I follow a general process of installing the OS, then patches, then MSIE v5.5 and its patches, then the individual apps themselves and any patches that the apps might have. I follow that general process when installing Linux as well, and it seems to work well. Now, on to the juicy stuff. One thing that I didn't really grasp is that the installation of Suse v9 automatically select the Wine alpha/beta, yes I know about watching what boxes is checked. When I went to test Crosover, I first did so with Wine installed and then Wine _not_ installed - the not installed version worked better, was more stable. With Crossover installed, I took that as my initial Windows OS installation, it had MSIE v5 loaded, which I patches successfully. Then, I updated MSIE to v6 SP1, patched successfully and ran fine. But, the java VM wasn't installed and couldn't be found. So, if you need to access a web site/server that mandates the Microsoft JVM, you're SOL, even Microsoft's web site said so, I next installed MS Office 2000, all went fine and apps run so-so. A bit sluggish, but okay for the time that I have to use them. My most often used app is Outlook 2000 to connect to an MS Exchange v5.5 mail server. That's when I found my first problem - there's only one mail profile, no option to use multiple setups. The suggested workaround for this that exists in the Crossover docs didn't work, no other solutions found. I installed Visio 2000 Pro, went fine and the app runs okay. If that worked, I thought that I should be able to install CD2's icon set. It didn't work, and Crossover warned me about it beforehand, so that was good. Thus far, Crossover has worked okay for what I needed it for, but just as a tolerable setup. I can appreciate their work and efforts, I'm sure more work is going to make it better as time goes on. But, I reported these findings to Codeweavers, no reply and no offers to help. I guess being a demo install doesn't equate me to an interested party trying to help, so they must not think me worthy of feedback. Whatever. As it stands, I'm running on more and more of Linux apps as time progresses and less dependence on MS. I'm basically just diving deeeeper and deeeeeeeeper as the days go on, today I made thru 6 hours before having to revert to my Windows 2000 hard disk. An hour ago, I found out why - I had to have interoperability with my text files between Linux and MSDOS/Windows text files. My creations in KWrite were afoul, KWrite wasn't creating plain text files with the CR/LF. I found out that I have to check the box (which isn't persistent between uses of KWrite) that formats the file as MSDOS format with regards to CR/LF. These are just a few things that means that, in my illustrious opinion, Suse v9 is easily up to task to handle any task that I can think of for this network engineer, but the interoperability between StarOffice/OpenOffice and MS Office is just not quite ready for prime time. Close, but far enough off to cause some folks to wait. I'm going to keep at it in hopes of making more inroads. All in all, 2004 should be a fun year to watch. If anyone has questions, I'll gladly go into details later. FWIW -Jeff