This is Will from BeYourOwnIT.com, and the Linux tutorial continues. This time, I’m going to go into a little more about how to actually use the system for productive work. As you can see, I changed my background because the background we were using was grating on me a little bit.

Most of the time, by “productive work,” they mean office suites. What can you actually do on the system? What if I have a piece of software that’s not working?

As far as office, they usually come with OpenOffice. OpenOffice you can also use in Windows. We actually have a video about OpenOffice itself.

You open up OpenOffice and you get something that looks pretty similar to an older version of Microsoft Word. You’ve got your Exports, you’ve got your Prints, and your Edits. Control+C for copy, Control+V for paste, Control+X for cut, that’s all the same. Fonts all work the same. Inserting tables all works the same. So, if you pretty much know how to use Microsoft Word, you’ll pretty much be at home once you’ve mapped the features in your mind.

Aside from that, we have spreadsheet, which is Excel, basically, and it’s going to work the same way. Presentation is PowerPoint. There’s also Drawing, which is graphics, it’s a little editing program.

Like I said before, if there’s software that you want to run, that’s not going to work… there’s no native equivalent of…

We’re actually going to be looking for Wine. Wine is a… it’s called a compatibility layer. It stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator.” It will let you run some of your Windows programs in Linux by emulating the background for the Windows programs themselves.

It will take a little bit to download. I want to pause the video and let it download, and I’m going to show you how to install a Window binary into Linux to run.

OK. Once Wine’s been installed, you can go to “Configure Wine.” The first time it does it, it’ll say “Configuring/home/username/.wine”. What the dot means is that the directory is hidden.

If you go to your Home folder… You do this by hitting Control+H, and it shows you all the hidden files. There’s the wine folder. Drive C is actually a Windows emulated drive: you’ve got your Users folder, and your Public, and your Program Files. Here’s Windows.

It comes with a basic version of IE, also…. Well, that didn’t work too well. Just need to open it with Wine.

That’s how Wine is. Sometimes it works beautifully, sometimes it doesn’t, but the important thing is to make sure it works with the program that you’re attempting to run.

There’s some graphics options, drive options, audio… It takes forever to load all the time, and it will tell me there’s no driver loaded for this particular configuration.

Anyhow, what we’re really after here is to show you how to install one.

This is a Windows .exe installer. It’s a Windows binary. If you run it, it tries to load it in Archive Manager. Not going to do anything. If you right click on it, and run it with Wine…

“Not marked as an executable.” All right. I’m actually going to go to the terminal here. “ls” is the directory command.

I heard some people had some problems seeing the terminal in the Windows versions, so I’m going to zoom in a little bit here. There, nice and big for you. We’re going to go to the desktop. Let’s see the desktop. Let’s open Wine… You can use tab to complete.

Now, you see the installer popped up. It’s actually using the Wine emulation layer. The program thinks it’s running in Windows. You’re probably going to get some error messages in here, it just happens.

This is Notepad++. I just picked a simple program that I could download, but there are complex and simple programs abound.

Tell it to run it. This is actually the Windows program itself. The Windows binary is actually running in Linux. After you install it, it should put it in the Wine program menu. Notepad++, and there you go.

If you want to see… if the program you’re using is available to be used with Wine, and it’s mainly for programs where there’s not an alternative readily available. If you go to Google, type in “AppDB.”

“AppDB” shows you the programs that Wine is currently tracking, and what their status is. Most of the top 25 are games, because that’s where Linux is a little short is the actual commercial games. But if you go down here a little ways, there’s Photoshop CS2. I mean, CS4. One of the Office editions used to be in here.

Silver means, it works… Issues that really don’t affect anything. You might have corrupted menus, or whatnot. Gold, works pretty well. You might have to change some things. Platinum, pretty much, works flawlessly.

If you are looking for a specific piece of software, you can go to either “Browse by Developer” or “Browse Apps.” Let’s say we wanted Excel.

See, some of these versions aren’t working. 97 works. The installer itself doesn’t work, but if you copy the directory from a Windows installation, and you drop it into the Wine directory, you can run it without installing it. But the older versions run just fine.

Then again, there’s also the alternatives, OpenOffice and everything that works. It did say, “Here’s native alternatives to use, instead of trying to use that.” The appdb.winehq.org website is very good at giving you options for native Windows programs that you might not have a version of to use in Linux.

This has been Will from BeYourOwnIT. I hope that you feel a little more comfortable with doing some of your daily work on a Linux PC now.

You can come by our website. If you have requests for new videos, you can drop them in the forums. If you have a computer problem, feel free to ask. We also have a complete line of products for teaching you how to repair your PC and start your own PC repair business.

I’ll see you in the next video.