Summary

Wine is great for running regular Windows programs, and office productivity applications. Quicken, according to Mr. Schwarz, runs flawlessly under Wine ”and it has since the fall of 2000. ^[*] If you do use it, be prepared for occasionally lacking documentation and for odd behavior. And please advise the maintainers of any bugs you find. That's the only way this can improve, and improve it has. The difference in the last 60 days alone, in terms of MS Word support, is huge. What I gave a B+ when I first started this chapter now gets a solid A.

^[*] Mr. Schwarz here: Mr. Anderson overstates the case somewhat. Quicken runs well enough to be usable under Wine. There are still a number of font and dialog box problems. I recently tried to export my Quicken data to QIF under Wine20010510 and it just plain crashed when I clicked the OK button to start the export. I do, however, fire up Quicken under Wine to key in my daily transactions. I then back these up to a floppy right away. I then " restore " from that floppy into my "official" copy of Quicken, which, yes, is still running under a "real" version of Windows. I'm just starting to fiddle with GNUCash, a Free Software GUI accounting package that runs under Linux. Alas, I don't know enough yet to include a chapter on it in this book, but if you want to look into this, check out http://www.gnucash.org/ to learn more.