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recode ibmpc:latin1 textfile

textfile is then replaced by the converted version. You can probably guess that to convert the same file back to Windows conventions, you would use:

recode latin1:ibmpc textfile

In addition to ibmpc (as used on Windows) and latin1 (as used on Unix), there are other possibilities available, such as latex for the LATEX style of encoding diacritics and texte for encoding French email messages. You can get the full list by issuing:

recode -l

If you do not like recode's habit of overwriting your old file with the new one, you can make use of the fact that recode can also read from standard input and write to standard output. To convert dostextfile to unixtextfile without deleting dostextfile, you could use:

recode ibmpc:latin1 < dostextfile > unixtextfile

With the tools just described, you can handle text files quite comfortably, but this is only the beginning. For example, pixel graphics on Windows are usually saved as bmp files. Fortunately, there are a number of tools available that can convert bmp files to graphics file formats, such as png or xpm, that are more common on Unix. Among these are the GIMP, which is probably included with your distribution.

Things are less easy when it comes to other file formats, such as those saved by office productivity programs. Although the various incarnations of the .doc file format used by Microsoft Word have become a de facto lingua franca for word processor files on Windows, it was until recently almost impossible to read those files on Linux. Fortunately, a number of software packages have appeared that can read (and sometimes even write) .doc files. Among them are the office productivity suite KOffice, the freely available OpenOffice.org, and the commercial StarOffice 6.0, a close relative to OpenOffice.org. Be aware, though, that these conversions will never be perfect; it is very likely that you will have to manually edit the files afterward. Even on Windows, conversions can never be 100% correct; if you try importing a Microsoft Word file into WordPerfect (or vice versa), you will see what we mean.

In general, the more common a file format is on Windows, the more likely it is that Linux developers will provide a means to read or even write it. Another approach might be to switch to open file formats, such as Rich Text Format (RTF) or Extensible Markup Language (XML), when creating documents on Windows. In the age of the Internet, where information is supposed to float freely, closed, undocumented file formats are an anachronism.

Emulation and Virtual Operating Systems

The next step up from using Windows files within Linux shells and applications is to make Linux act like Windows so it can run Windows applications . In this section we discuss the two most popular ways to do this: Wine (along with CrossOver Office) and VMware.

Wine

Wine can get you out of a number of high-pressure situations, whether it's your friends bugging you to play the latest Half-Life 2 mod, or finding out after you converted your entire corporation to Linux that the CEO can't function without his favorite Access database.

Wine is a free software project that lets you run your favorite Windows programs on Linux. It does this by implementing Microsoft's Win32 application programming interface (only on Intel x86 systems).

The acronym Wine expands to "Wine Is Not an Emulator." Rather than emulating a Windows system, Wine translates between the Windows program and the underlying Linux system. You can think of Wine and its libraries as a piece of middleware that sits between your application and Linux (not unlike those other APIs we mentioned). However, no one will get angry if you call it an emulator because it sort of works like one.

Wine's roots can be traced back to 1993 and the earliest days of Linux. A group of developers thought it might be interesting to get Windows programs to run on Linux. At the time, Microsoft used the Win16 API in Windows 3.1. A newer operating system, Windows NT, was under