Thank you for the responses, but it isn't that easy. I'm aware of projects such as WineX, which is software that looks for APIcalls from MS software and attempts to do the necessary in order to allow software written for Windows to run under Linux (in WIneX's case, specifically games), but a check of Transgaming Technologies website shows that not all games work equally well, and some can still not be run at all - it would appear that the programmers need to look at individual games in order to get them to run well under WineX.
I gather that AH could be run with some glitches under WineX, but I have no idea whether AH2 could be.
The ideal solution would be for there to be a Linux-specific version of AH2. If software is created with cross-platform availability in the first place, then producing binaries to run on different platforms can be reduced to little more than running the source code through a comiler for each platform to be covered. Sadly, most software companies have in the past tended to concentrate specifically on Windows without a thought for sales on other platforms. I'm hoping that perhaps the MMOL flight sim community might show a bit of a lead and look to the future by starting to provide cross-platform availability as a matter of course.
Incidentally, the "version of Linux" mentioned is probably Lindows or Xandros or the like. I woudl caution people thinking of taking that route because some of those distros have strived so hard to emulate the look and feel of Windows that they have essentially removed (or turned off) a fair bit of the security features that makes Linux the better operatiing system in terms of security. Running any OS as Root or Administrator if you dont understand the damage you can potentially do to your system is not a good idea.
Esme