ghost_crab asks: "After finally getting the guts to fdisk all my M$ problems away, I find myself happier and less stressed. Now all I want for Christmas is a good, solid Flash editor, a la Macromedia's Flash, or even Adobe's Live Motion, neither of which run well with WINE. I have queried both companies for projected *nix releases, and both have instead emphatically supported the EvilEmpire. A search with Google and of SourceForge gives one little hope. Is anyone working on Flash for Linux? Open Source or Not - I would be thrilled to pay for a good Flash Editor. Is there hope for those of us who claim to be graphic designers yet cannot stomach Windows for even one more day?" Is there anyone out there working on replacements for the plugins that are only available for Windows?

As you know, we sent questions out to Bruce Campbell a few weeks ago, and his answer are below. Please note that Bruce didn't have time to reply to all of them via email as he was pretty busy, so he called and dictated answers. I've done the best I can to convey his answers below. Thanks to Bruce for the interview! Also, if you haven't picked up his book yet, you should. It is in it's 8th printing, so it's been doing well.

friedmud wrote in to tell us about a comment from a Maxis developer, Don Hopkins, who did a partial linux port of "The Sims". You can find his post here (3rd one down, comment from Don Hopkins titled "Reality check from a game developer") in a LinuxGames.com forum. I don't know if I agree with his assertion that Wine is the best way to have games happen on Linux but his comments on the economics of Linux games development and especially the costs of keeping versions concurrent on multiple platforms are insightful.

Eugenia writes "OSNews talks with Alexandre Julliard, the WINE project leader and also CodeWeaver's coder, regarding the future of WINE, the obstacles of the development, the WINE commercialization and lots more. An interesting read overall."

pseen wrote to us with a conversation with Scott Draeker (of Loki Games concerning the recent Transgaming and Wine announcements, as well as the Mandrake Linux Gamer announcements.

dcd asks: "It is interesting from time to time to look at what others are searching for using Google Zeitgeist The number 2 gaining request was for Moorhuhn3, which seems to be a freeware game that is popular in Germany. Searching for 'moorhuhn linux' brings up this page which when translated on google are directions and links to play it on Linux using WINE. Now two questions come to mind: Has anyone found a 'real-time' method to find out what is actively being searched for on google (I think alta-vista used to do this); Has anyone tried this freeware game, and was it interesting? For the curious, here's another web page describing this game and Linux." Back in a time before Google, I used Metacrawler for searches and that had Metaspy which I think is a good example of what the submittor is describing. I haven't tried this Moorhuhn Chicken game, but after visiting the sites, I must say it looks intriguing.

nstbbuff sent in a link to a story running at ZD about Lindows, a recently funded startup founded by MP3.com's old CEO that plans to sell a WINE oriented Linux dist for $99. As usual I'm skeptical about these sorts of things, but provided code is released back, I'm down with it. Meanwhile Transgaming is doing their thing, but with game-specific stuff. Their flagship release is The Sims, but theoretically many DirectX games should run under Windows. I'm still skeptical -- I mean, how many closed WINE forks does the world need?

Tonight in Slashback: More on TransGaming's approach to the world (and licenses), another sweet box of French Linux goodness, another piece of the stolen-Enigma puzzle is pressed firmly into place, and a small piece of travel advice.

nicsterrr asks: "Since returning to education and discovering the delights of signal processing and numerical computation, I have become increasingly unhappy with Matlab. Mathworks refuse to release the Linux student version of Matlab in Europe (their official reason is that apparently us Europeans would pirate it frantically if they did), and hence I have had to run the windows version with Wine (with moderate success). I (and many others) would love to use Octave as our primary numerical computation package, but it is limited in areas such as signal processing, control systems, and especially graphical functions. Their homepage does not give much insight into Octave's current development and likely future. How many people are involved in Octave, or would like to be? Am I one of many that feel a new, concerted effort should be taken to transform Octave into a complete replacement for Matlab? This is a critical piece of open source software for universities and the lack of a Matlab replacement is one of the reasons my department frowns on our requests for Linux based PCs."

twilightzero asks: "Recently a friend of mine who is chief engineer at a medium size recording studio/radio station has become increasingly unhappy with Windows (and would like to stay away from Macs) and has asked me if there is any sort of professional audio solution for Linux. Has anybody, anywhere ever tried this? Is it possible to buy a pro audio card with Linux drivers and just run Sound Forge in WINE or do you need an entirely native package?" This is one of those questions that just needs to be answered. What Open Source sound packages out there are good enough for even the professionals to use when they need to make their squeaks, squeals, and whistles. Also, what can they use to put their created sounds together into some semblance of music?

LiquidPC writes "ONLamp.com has a detailed new article on setting up and using Windows Applications in WINE, one of the many FreeBSD ports you could have alot of fun with. It also suggests going to WineHQ to find out which programs will work in wine, and which ones will not, so you dont have to waste all your time testing."

illusion_2K writes "Another monumental step forward for Linux - the SirCam virus now works on Linux via WINE. ("With a few ommissions")" Allright I had to post it. Thats damn funny. We can emulate worms if we want to!

mjh asks: "I've been running Debian GNU/Linux on my company supplied laptop for 3 months now. I got permission from my manager to run it on the network, but I did not go through the somewhat rigorous process of getting the software certified. I have legitimate business reasons for using it on the corporate network (which is why my manager approved it). I even managed to get Lotus Notes to run under wine so I never had to boot into Winders at all (unless someone sent me a PPT doc). I was pretty happy...until I brought the entire network down." Anyone else running Linux on a Token Ring network who would care to talk about their own experiences?

securitas writes: "ZDNet has posted a comparative review of 5 Windows-on-Linux emulators from VMware (2), NeTraverse, WinToNet and Wine." The results encountered varied quite a bit -- none of the products are perfect, but it looks like they hit a particularly disappointing time with Wine.

Last week you asked Bradley Kuhn, VP of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) questions about working with RMS, his views on software freedom, and much more. He's answered at length below, on everything from becoming a saint to the "web app loophole," perl, and the next iteration of the GPL.

brunes69 notes that you can read the news that konqueror is supporting ActiveX. I saw it being done at at LinuxTag (as well as wine running The Sims!) so its coming. This ought to do a lot to give Linux users compatibility on sites the force shockwave or other obnoxious activex plug-ins.

Swordfish is the second stupid movie in recent months -- Antitrust was the other -- to exploit the hacker myth/legend and wrap a mindless crash-bang action film around it. The first minutes of this film are promising, a neat riff on the nature of movies and their endings. But after that, there isn't an auto smash-up or explosion that this movie doesn't love. Maybe producers think it's hip to write goofy and unrealistic hacker characters into silly films, that they will make this tired form contemporary in some way. But if there's much more of this, the term "hacker" will become as distorted a word as the media has tried to make it. SPOILAGE WARNING: Plot is discussed, no ending.

James Hills writes: "Recently there has been much discussion about what is better for the future of Linux, to continue the process of native ports or embrace WineX so you can run all the Windows games you want on your favorite OS. Unfortunately, this debate also has tremendous repercussions for the future of companies such as Loki, Tribsoft and Hyperion. Read more for how the heads of Transgaming, TuxGames, Loki, Tribsoft, and Hyperion see the issue."

Warrior-GS writes "Transgaming is working on a process that allows Linux users to play Windows games. According to their CEO, Gavriel State: "Essentially, TransGaming's work allows gamers to take off-the-shelf Windows games and run them directly under Linux. It won't run every game out there at first, but 100% compatibility is our long-term goal. To accomplish this, we have been working on a new Linux implementation of the DirectX multimedia APIs. Our work is closely tied with the Wine project -- an Open Source effort to implement the Microsoft Windows APIs on Linux -- in essence, a Windows compatibility layer. Wine is not an emulator in the traditional sense -- it doesn't emulate a CPU or any other hardware -- it loads and executes Windows programs directly on your Linux hardware without the need for any Microsoft code to be installed at all." The whole interview can be found at GameSpy."

In some ways, the Net Revolution, like most others, is a sad and strange story to be told: one of almost unbelievable and rapid change, excitement, opportunity and disappointment. It's also a story of a great backlash, growing doubts, and broken promises. Technologically, the network has proved to be one of the fastest growing phenomena in the history of invention. But politically and socially, few of the early hopes for it have materialized, and the counterattack is underway. Is the Net Revolution out of touch with human beings? Second of a series. (Read more).