I need to use a MS WINDOWS based real-time charting program (for HK market). Is that Linux can do this and how is the result? How strong my machine got to be?
You have a couple of options. 1. Wine. http://www.winehq.org Wine is basically an implementation of Win32 API on Linux/Solaris etc. Some Windows software works and some doesn't. You may have to play around to get something to work. It's possible to replace individual Wine dll's with native Windows dll's to get some software to work. It runs slower than native Windows for most applications. 2. Vmware. http://www.vmware.com Vmware allows one or more instances of Windows to run as a guest operating system on a Linux host operating system. Windows runs in a Linux window or alteratively full screen. Most windows software will run perfectly. Again it is somewhat slower than native windows. Vmware is a very good product. As to how powerfull a machine is required, it depends on what you are doing, but plently of memory is recommended especially for VMWare. 512 MByte at least.
I mentioned this on another thread. I tried running MetaStock under VMWare and it was a disaster, so beware. I believe you can run AmiBroker under Linux, someone posted some links in that other thread if you wanna do a search. H