[CORed]

VMware should work, because it is basicly a software emulation of a PC that you install Windows (or any PC OS) into. Crossover office is really a user-friendly frontend for WINE, with prebuilt configuration files for supported applications. It was worth the forty bucks or so to get Internet Explorer, which the Party client requires running. It can be done in WINE, but takes quite a bit of fiddling with config files to make it work. With WINE or crossover office and an unsupported application, it often takes a lot of fiddling to get anything to work. A lot of the WINE or crossover office emulation DLL's are incomplete, and you need to use actual Windows dll's. Some of the lower level Windows DLL's don't work with WINE or crossover office. I love Linux, and it is a great OS for a web server or network file server, and it has some decent productivity applications available now, but for a desktop system, there is so much software (including poker clients), that it's hard to get along without Windows. This means you either need to dual boot, use VMware, or use two networked PC's, one with Linux and one with Windows, and either use a Windows X server on the Windows box (Cywin includes a decent free one, and there are lots of commercial ones available) or use rdesktop to access your Windows box from your Linux box (XP Pro is needed on the Windows box for this).