wine is my new favourite toy.

one of the problems with jumping operating system from windows to linux is that there are a few bits of software that i need to run over to my old windows box to use. this is because there simply aren’t any linux packages that can deal with business accounting, including things like vat returns, as well as sage instant accounting can. (that’s quite a compliment from me, i hate sage, it’s the bane of my life at times but i don’t currently believe that migrating my accounts to another system would be any less bane-ful and besides accounts suck anyway and i don’t believe any tool can make them fun.)

this is where wine comes in, it’s a piece of unix software that allows you to run windows applications under unix and so far i highly recommend it. you don’t need a windows installation on your machine or any windows startup disks. it doesn’t give you a whole virtual windows machine. it does allow you to run single windows applications which means you don’t have to jump from linux box to windows box all the time. so far i love it and it works beautifully for my purposes.