My online inquiries indicated Wine was simply a free version of VMWare, but that VMWare would properly install more applications. I believe it was VMWare that had approved installs of Quicken.
I’m waiting until after the holidays. Then I’ll buy a partition manager to change my partition sizes, and begin looking at some of these applications. Right now, my Linux partition is quite small (7.4GbZ) so I don’t want to go too far in installing stuff.
I like Linux. It’s a lot faster than XP. I’m just taking my time :)
VMWare is a full hardware emulator; within which you can run almost any x86 PC operating system, including DOS or Windows. It costs money to license, and it costs money to upgrade your hardware, especially with more memory, sufficiently to run it well. It doesn't provide high end graphics support as needed by gamers, but otherwise it will run the latest Windows XP software with few limits. It's a PC within a PC.
WINE is an entirely different product, different design and different set of people. It provides Windows like calls on a native Linux boot. It runs all the Windows stuff you don't care about -- the easy and older stuff. But serious gamers, serious Quicken users and serious Photoshop users will find it inadequate to their needs. You don't use a licensed Windows install within WINE. It's Linux pretending, mostly, to be Windows.
I have all three kinds of systems in front of me that can run recent versions of Quicken: (1) a dual boot Windows XP and Linux box, (2) VMWare on a big, fast PC, and (3) a separate PC that I only boot into Windows. I actually end up using the Quicken on that separate PC, because it's more convenient than dual booting or using VMWare.
I've never actually worked with or used WINE, but it was my impression that it was an environment for allowing native Windows applications to run under Linux.
VMWare is a virtualization system that allows you to run an operating system in a virtual machine. That VM actually virtualizes the hardware of a PC. You can watch the POST, and even go into the BIOS and make changes, just like on a "real" PC. In effect, when you start up VMWare, you'll be booting a PC with (in your case) Windows XP. Because of that, you should find that you can run just about any software as long as it doesn't make hardware specific calls that the VM can't deal with. Like I said, you can download a free demo, if you like. I couldn't live without VMWare Workstation. I use it all the time.
Mark