Tom writes:

> If you eventually want to dump (ahem "have an alternative to")
>  Microsoft, then you'll need to get "X" installed and you'll want to look
>  into StarOffice [now distributed by SUN] or Applixware -- both of these are
>  complete "suites" to supplant Microsoft Office

Or if you don't want to dump Microsoft, but rather would prefer it to run
only slightly slower than it would natively, you can run it under an
emulator, on top of Linux. The best such emulator appears to be:

     www.vmware.com

In that regard, my son recently wrote me:

> I have this completely unbelievable Linux box running the K desktop
>  environment and I have Windows NT running in a window (most
>  stable NT yet! :-) )  This is not WABI or some flaky binary emulation;
>  vmware creates a virtual X86 environment complete with its own
>  bios and maps the hardware interfaces across to Linux features.  I
>  even have NT using DHCP up to my ISP by "bridging" across the
>  Linux host to and up my DSL line.

It appears that it's possible, when using vmware, to be able to run 95, 98,
NT, BeOS, and Linux all simultaneously (although clearly, it's going to take
a fairly big and fast machine to do this).

Wirt Atmar