Well I downloaded a trial of Cross Over Office and gave it a spin — I have to say I’m impressed. Its technology that works. I installed IE6 w/o any effort on my part. I also installed iTunes 4.7, though I was hoping for something slightly newer. Then I tried some non-free software — — — Microsoft Office 2003 — and by god it worked. I ran MS Word 2003 on linux — it was amazing. It was a tad slow, but thats ok. Then I tried one bit of “unsupported” software and that was Skype 2.0 beta — granted I didnt get the audio settings right so I couldn’t make calls, but otherwise the software worked.
If you want to run windows app (if X-Over Office claims they support it) on linux, this is most defenetly the way to go — they got the shit right and working.