So, yesterday my younger sister migrated from Windows to Ubuntu (yes!). At the time, I felt really stupid for migrating her "new" computer into our room and putting everything back together again, then staring stupidly at the monitor and trying to figure out what was wrong. As I was so articulate in saying, "the monitor like keeps turning off," referring to it going into standby mode since there wasn't any video input. That turned out that there were two possible video input slots, and I had plugged the monitor into the wrong one. D'oh. Cue stupid feeling.

Today, I decided to play around with WINE and see what old Windows programs would run under Linux Windows emulation, partially for her benefit and partially for my own curiosity, as I'd never used WINE before.

As it turns out: some things work, and a lot of things don't. It seemed that more things designed to work on Windows 98 worked than those designed to work on 95. Math Blaster, Word Munchers, and JumpStart Adventures 6th Grade worked without a hitch, as well as The Magic School Bus Explores the World of Animals. I couldn't get older Magic School bus games to work, nor Reading Blaster or Creatures 2, most citing video or CD problems. It's possible that these might have been able to be fixed with a little more work, but I really didn't feel like spending any more time on it.

All in all, it's not really imperative that these things work; it's just interesting to find out. Many of them may be old, but they still find use.