[CORed]

If you really want to run Windows software, you need Windows, either under Vmware, or dual boot. Pokerstars works reasonably well under Wine, but the table resizing is a tad flaky, and I don't think the pot and stack totals show when you hover your mouse cursor. I never did really get Party to work very well under linux/wine, in spite of hours of fiddling with dll's and the config file, I like Linux, but the need to run Windows software (especially Poker software) keeps me on the dark side a lot of the time.

One option for Linux (Ubuntu or other distribution), is to run it on an old PC. Linux isn't quite as demanding as Windows in terms of hardware, but you do need at least 512K of memory if you want to run Gnome or KDE. If you have a Linux box and a Windows box on a LAN, you can run an X server or(Xming is a decent free one) on the Windows box to access your Linux apps, or run rdb (Linux remote desktop client) on the Linux box to access the Windows box. You can also use a VNC client and server to go in either direction.