Thanks for the reply, it looks as I if not give enough info on why run wine. I would not under most circumstances even consider cross platform running of any program. Linux unfortunately does not have a native train simulator. Openbve (runnning under wine using mono) is avaible as a package on Debian, but I find it (openbve) to be to restricted at the current stage of development. Now around 3 or so years ago a group started work, using the XNA toolkit under Windows, on an a sort of open source train sim called OpenRails (OR) that could use Microsoft Train Simulator material. Some months ago the licence of OR was changed to GPL. Very recently this was shown to run perfectly OK under Wine 1.6. What this effectively means is that finally Linux has a train sim. Its not my first choice way of getting one but a train sim is a __very __ difficult thing to program from scratch, the programming requiring a great deal of knowledge from also sorts of strange disciplins (Note 1). Now I have found a Doc showing how one can set up a 32 bit development enviroment on an AMD64 machine, but I have the strong impression that the whole thing (running 32 bit windows on a AMD64 machine) is a "kludge". At this stage of the game for my use I have found i386 Debian does all I wish with no problems what so ever. Now I am not saying this situation will last for ever, just that is the situation as I see it at the moment. Now as Trent says its actual quite easy to install a wine run enviroment on Linux, it appears though a development enviroment is another story. A search on the net bringing up little recent information on setting one up. Even then as I said using it seems like a real "kludge". I will consider the issue, no real hurray. Note 1: Porting OR to a native Linux app I believe would not be easy, its writen in C# using the XNA tool kit on top of DirectX 9. Linux does not have a native C# compiler, although I believe someone is working on an XNA toolkit replacement for Linux. It would still mean havine to virtual reprogram the whole thing to convert it to even C++. Lindsay